Tracking user stories in JIRA / Greenhopper

Question

If anyone is trying to do agile, i am trying to figure out a way to use JIRA / Greenhopper for this. We are a global dev team so the distributed nature is crucial here.

We were initially using Scrumworks but the team complained that they had duplicate information in JIRA and scrumworks all the time and thought it was redundant.

We got Greenhopper and thought that would solve our problems but the problems that i have with this are:

1. No User story concept in JIRA
2. Greenhopper too "task" focused without aggregation at the user story level.

Has anyone successfully done this in JIRA or should we look at moving back to other tools like scrumworks and just use JIRA for bugs raised by our support team.

Answer 1

Hi,

You can add your own Issue types in JIRA. Just add a type called User Story.

Then make sure to enable your sub-tasks feature in JIRA. You will then be able to explode your stories int multiple Subtasks. The integration of the subtasks is pretty nice if you reuse the Ranking feature. See: http://www.greenpeppersoftware.com/confluence/display/GH/PLANNING+BOARD#PLANNINGBOARD-ordering

You will then be able to

1) Estimate your Stories in Story points

2) Prioritize your issues (with the ranking field)

3) Explode your stories in multiple subtasks that you will estimate in hours.

You should post your questions on the GreenHopper forum, might have more and quicker answers. http://www.greenpeppersoftware.com/site/forums/list.page

Cheers,

Answer 2

You might also try using an Agile Lifecycle Management product such as Rally, www.rallydev.com. Rally is built from the ground up to support any agile process and create comprehensive reports across teams. Check it out.