FDD and JIRA: Working with Filters

Filters are very powerful. As you can filter use to:

• Display features: present the important information at one glance
• Bulk change features: change for a whole group of features the attributes, move them to another state and so on.
• Reporting: JIRA has reporting capacities as well as JIRA offers an API to retrieve features by filters.

Display features
JIRA offers on the filter view a link to: Set Column Order for filter. (see second image) This allows to add and remove columns as well as setting the order of them.

To display features we need the following columns:

• Feature ID
• Key (JIRA Issue-ID)
• Summary
• Business Activity
• Open Issues
• (Description) if wished

Here the result of or filter sorted by the Feature ID. The links are highlighted yellow.

Bulk change features
Another functionality is to apply changes over a whole group of features. We use it to:

• set the component
• set the work-package (version)
• transition features through workflow
• assign the features to responsible person

JIRA check if everything works correctly and only proposes things that are possible. It's a great way to work efficiently.

FDD and JIRA: Filtering Features

In this post I show how to create a Filter with the needed columns to get a good overview from the project (subject area).
Creating a Filter

In a simple project you only have to specify the Project and the Issue Type 'Feature'.
To see what is going on during a workpackage choose the workpackage.
Of course it is possible to add filter-criteria on every field, so create filters for all needs you have.
















Share the Filter

You can share the important filters with the whole team, so everybody sees the same features and the work has be done only once. The only thing you have to do is add shares and of course an appropriate name, resp. description.

FDD and JIRA: Working with Features

In this post I will talk how to work with features. The following points are explained:

• Create a Feature
• Add a Bug or a Change to a Feature

Create a Feature
This is done like with any other JIRA-issue.

Just choose the Type Feature. A Feature is a defined Issue Type. They are (will be) explained in posts about administration.

The following fields are to set:

• Feature ID: this is a unique identifier like a number, to reference the feature in other sources like reporting, model etc.
• Summary: the sentence that describes the feature, in the pattern: {action} the {result} {by|for|of|to} a(n) {object}
• Business Activity: choose the Business Activity where to add the feature
  
• Description: a detailed description of the feature
• Open Issues: if there are assumptions or open questions this is the place. whenever the issue is solved remove them here. So this field should indicate in an overview if there are open points.
• Orginal Estimate: Estimation of the feature - this can also be edited at a later time.
• Concerns: a Feature is about some business logic (domain), but it needs sometimes a GUI, a client, persistence or some integration.

These fields can be edited on the way. Add a Bug or a Change to a Feature As a feature is the entry-point for any further work we have the possibility to add sub-task to a feature. We have defined at the moment:

• FeatureConcern: a feature describes mainly the business logic in a technology independent way. To describe the user interaction (GUI) or the integration with other technologies (INT) you can define a FeatureAddon. These can than be used in reporting to indicate if the feature has a GUI or needs integration.
• FeatureScenario: it is possible to describe different scenarios. This allows for example the direct export into a testing tool.
• FeatureBug: if a Bug is detected that is related to that feature you want to add a FeatureBug.
• FeatureChange: whenever the customer is not happy with the result, or they change their mind a FeatureChange can record that.

At the moment we haven't different screens for sub-tasks, we will adjust that when needed.

FDD and JIRA: Intro

In our company we introduced FDD (Feature Driven Development) as our way developing software.
After organising the features in an Excel-sheet (what was really flexible when experimenting with FDD) we now try to integrate the features directly in JIRA.
In the following Blogs I want to explain how we did that, and on the way I want comment on the experiences we will make. I assume that you know the basics from FDD and JIRA.
This blog will also be the introduction for my colleagues.

I will split the blogs in the following categories:

• Administration: what needs to be done in JIRA to get started
• Working with Features: the daily work with the Features
• ...

I will add the categories as needed.