Adopting Atlassian Products Brain Dump

Assumptions

• We want to move forward with Jira and Confluence

• Anything we do, we can change later

• Dedicated tools NOW, and learning those tools, outweighs waiting for the perfect structure to manifest itself

Recent realizations

• Everything is an issue of some description, and ties back to a previous “Epic”, in Jiraspeak.

  • Maybe we don’t have documentation of how or why or whose epic, or maybe it was something I did last week that had downstream consequences, but everything we do is attached to something bigger

• “Tickets”/ tts-slate e-mail isn’t an area— in Getting-Things-Done parlance, it’s an Inbox—a place where stuff waits to be added to the workstream as a bug or a task or a story that is part of an Epic.

• Documentation and client training are part of every issue. There is a bigger Training/Outreach/Knowledge Management “Area” in PARA terms, as well, but every issue also includes both.

• Was thinking that we should connect Confluence → Jira but recently realized the big benefit might be pulling Jira into Confluence… Saw some videos where people created pages in Confluence to display high-level info about ongoing projects. 🤯

Jira Issue Types

Suggestions for structure

• Jira Projects are the top level; for now, Slate is our one and only top level project.

• Epics are the bigger chunks—like the basic structure we started here:

• I have probably been watching too many Confluence videos, but I like the idea of a story as the client desire/what they are getting from this. They may or may not line up exactly with how we know the Epic is complete, but it’s not a hierarchy—“ story” is something parallel with tasks.

• I think the PARA Areas for our work include

  • Training/Documentation/Outreach

  • Requested Updates/Development (I was tempted to label this ‘unnecessary updates’)

  • Necessary Updates/Cycle Prep

• I think Areas are Initiatives… especially if we are careful in identifying who our clients are, so we can track how much effort/time each school is getting

• There are functional areas in Slate (forms, rules, queries, reports, workflows), which I think are labels in Jira (and in Confluence)

• For the next two months, it doesn’t seem like we are going to have a lot of time to developing any sort of organized system. I suggest we set ourselves some basic principles, and then work ‘our system’, whatever that looks like, until we can actually spend some time together looking at what works.

  • As much as I hate it, for Jira that probably means not deactivating a billion fields and cleaning up the views, by letting everything ride (and maybe adding more) to find things that capture the sort of data we want.

  • I think Confluence will benefit from us just building pages that work for whatever we are documenting, and over time figuring out how all of the pieces fit together.

    • The one Confluence suggestion I have is that we make all the labels for everything we can think of in Confluence, and use them all over everything. By August we can pare them down and figure out what actually makes sense. 

Suggested Resources

https://youtu.be/5p3QzaS33GA This video really helped me “get” Confluence… it’s long but it covers a lot (and I listened at 2x speed).

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Difference-and-use-cases-of-Jira-issue-types-Epic-vs-Story-vs/ba-p/1655157 This article helped me get a better sense of using epics vs. stories vs. tasks.