What is Jira?

Jira is a work management tool for software teams that need to organise and track their work. Jira is incredibly flexible and can be customised to work with a team’s workflow, meaning teams of all kinds can enjoy increased productivity and visibility as they march toward releasing amazing software.

How do Pugpig use Jira?

The Pugpig team use Jira for numerous projects across multiple cross functional teams. Jira allows us to track upcoming work, current project statuses and manage feedback and QA tasks from both internal and external stakeholders. Some of these are:

• Internal Product Development
• Infrastructure Development
• Professional Services Client Projects
• Quality Assurance

Jira for Professional Services client projects

During onboarding sessions with your customer success manager and project manager we will introduce you to ways of working throughout the project lifecycle. One of these sessions will cover a brief introduction into your projects Jira board and what it's likely to look like.  The following is a best practice guide to using your project Jira board and how we can work with you to ensure a smooth and hassle free development process.

Accessing Jira

During the project development phase your project manager or customer success manager can provide you access to the board. Access isn't mandatory , however use of Jira reduces project costs and time spent moving tasks into our boards. If you require access to your board and have yet to receive an invite please speak to our team.

The board

Figure 1 - An example client project Jira board

Once you accept your invite to Jira, upon login you should have a single project available to you. If you are unable to see your project board or can see projects which don't appear relevant to you, please contact us.

Figure 1 provides an example of what your Jira board is likely to look like. The individual items you see in that image are what are known as epics. An epic is simply a task to group smaller tasks together. When you first load your board, most of these epics will likely be expanded rather than minimised.

Figure 2 below, shows an example of an expanded epic with child tasks seen below.

Figure 2 - An example client project Jira board with an expanded epic

Using the board and creating tickets

Most of the tickets(tasks) seen within your Jira board are for the Pugpig team to work on. You're are free to follow along what we are doing in each ticket but we ask you not to update statuses or change the ticket context in anyway. If you have questions please use the comments section of a ticket to communicate with us.

There are often tickets that we require input from you on, in this case we will either assign the ticket to you, and/or tag you in the comments. In each of these scenarios you will receive an email with details regarding the update. The email received will also contain a link to the specific ticket and comments referenced.

There will usually be a point in the project where we ask you to provide feedback on the current progress of project features and development. The best way to do this is by creating a new ticket. Figure 3 indicates the button that will do this for you within the current project.

Figure 3 - The create ticket button

Figure 4 - The create ticket modal

The modal shown within figure 4 is what is displayed after clicking the ‘Create’ button on the board. The first 3 fields can be ignored and should not be changed. These are:

• Project
• Task
• Status

Figure 5 shows the two main fields that you should make use of to fill in your feedback ticket.

Figure 5 - The ticket details

Summary - This is your ticket title. A short and easily understandable title/description should be provided here.

Description - This is where you can provide the full details of your feedback/issue. As much detail and information as possible is helpful to our team. Images and videos are always encouraged, these can either be pasted into the the description or attached to the ticket using the ‘Attachments’ section.

All other fields should be ignored. If you feel you would like to use any of them please contact your CSM/PM to confirm there will be no adverse effects.

Types of tickets you should create

Tickets should only be created whilst there is an active professional services project in progress. Outside of an active project, requests for changes should be made via your CSM and/or the Pugpig support team.

Project Feedback - During the development process we will ask you to start logging your feedback. The best way to do this is to break the feedback into sections. Lots of tickets for individual requests are time consuming for you to create and for us to work through. Similarly, one big ticket with all your feedback in can become quite difficult to track and monitor. The best way to break your feedback into different sections is by looking at your current Bolt app. A feedback ticket for each bottom navigation option would be a good way to break the app up.

Feature Enhancements - If you have additional requirements that have not yet been scoped or estimated you could create a ticket as a place to discuss and plan this change. Whilst this works well for small changes, bigger requests should be raised via email/slack where communication and understanding can take place first.

Bug Reporting - If you encounter issues or crashes within your app these should be raised with us. Please provide as much detail as possible to help us recreate the issue you experience. Supporting images, videos and logs are useful. The following document details how you can obtain app logs to send.
https://docs.pugpig.com/debugging/how-to-find-and-email-app-logs?from_search=161637829

Raising Tickets Via Slack Channels

We would always ask you not to raise numerous issues directly in Slack. Individual urgent issues are perfectly fine, but using it as a tool to log feedback is unmanageable.

If you would like to provide feedback via Slack rather than direclty on the Jira board, speak to your project manager and they can provide you a form to do this.  The Slack form will look similar to figure 6 and allows you to provide the key details required for your feedback.

Figure 6 - An example Slack feedback form