Re: best practices - JIRA fields for the docs team ?

[Shawn <shawn -at- cohodata -dot- com>]

Hello Monique (et al),

How did you make out with your quest for information related to jira and
documentation?

I am also tasked with creating a suitable workflow in jira. In my jira
workflow, I need to account for engineering documentation notifications
(when a change in our project impacts documentation), several QA steps
(draft QA, QA revisions, and QA final document), etc.

Any jira workflow examples will be appreciated and in return, I'll be happy
to share my final workflow (with explanations) to the group.

Thanks,
Shawn



On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 10:20 AM, Monique Semp <monique -dot- semp -at- earthlink -dot- net>
wrote:

> Hello, TechWR-L-ers,
>
> Iâm looking for best practices and advice on how Tech Pubs can best use
> JIRA. (And this is sort of a long message, but I figure itâs a useful
> discussion.)
>
> I donât think Iâm talking high-level philosophical discussions about Agile
> and working with other teams, but low-level details such as useful
> fields/values to make it easy to get sensible JIRA reports so that we can
> easily summarize our âtechnical debtâ, set priorities of individual tasks
> within a category (such as PDF look-and-feel improvements, which is not
> easy from DITA source). But perhaps the low-level details must be informed
> by the higher-level philosophy?
>
> Background:
>
> A while ago I was able to get a DOC project added to our JIRA system.
> There are separate projects for each main system component, so it seemed
> appropriate to add a DOC project to the mix.
>
> Now I have the opportunity to add whatever fields/values would be good for
> the DOC projectâs tech writers.
>
> Thoughts:
>
> So, for example, I think that we need more issue types than simply Bug,
> Epic, Story, Improvement, or Support Incident. It seems that the issue
> types should be able to differentiate between info for a doc topic vs. Pubs
> tasks such as creating a TXT target in ePublisher or firming up screenshot
> guidelines.
>
> But perhaps the usual method is to use the usual Components/s field in
> JIRA, and to configure the field values for things such as Component-1-doc,
> Tech-Pubs-process, etc.?
>
> As well, there is a discussion (which Iâve seen at *every* place Iâve
> worked in the last few years) about how to treat a software bug for which
> we need to document how things are now (with the bug), and then when the
> bug is fixed in a future release weâll need to change the user doc to
> reflect the change. (Yes, I know that ideally the docs are always âhow
> things are supposed to beâ and then the Release Notes document the
> exceptions. But thatâs just not always practical, and certainly not helpful
> to the end user, who months into a release is not expecting to need to
> refer to the Release Notes.)
>
> That is, whatâre the merits of adding a Docs component to the software bug
> vs. creating a child bug in the DOC project? In the former case, there
> would be no separate JIRA ticket to track for the doc task, which makes it
> harder for the Docs team. But it seems difficult to get software teams to
> remember to create appropriate separate tickets for the docs tasks.
>
> Wrap-up:
>
> Of course Iâd like answers to the specific questions Iâve raised, but Iâm
> sure that there are lots of things I havenât thought of, which is why Iâm
> looking to the TechWR-L community for a lively conversation :-).
>
> Thanks,
> -Monique
>
-- 
*Shawn Connelly*
Technical writer
  <shawn -at- cohodata -dot- com>
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