What are Jira Workflows? How Do They Help You?

Cubix

3 Jun, 2022

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7 min read

Jira Workflows

The industrial atmosphere needs more agility and fast-paced developmental tools to strive on any challenging grounds. Luckily, such tools do exist to streamline any business approach, development cycle, and all the aspects included within.

However, when reflecting on integrating a robust and agile development ecosystem into an organization, Jira cannot escape a technical individual’s mind. To simply put it, Jira is a management tool by Atlassian that enables teams to track bugs and proceed with agility within any work environment. From creating standardized work processes to being a handy tool for project teams, Jira is an indispensable tool for businesses and organizations alike.

In addition, it’s already a spread-out tool used by myriad industries to rationalize cutting-edge uses. What’s better? Jira works in both manner – default and customized. With Jira, you can now create your own custom processes relating to your company’s requirements and goals.

This post aims at reviewing the key development tool – Jira, from various angles, along with its best practices that are crucial to several project management teams.

What Are Jira Workflows?

Jira works very well in work management. All tasks and processes are aligned smoothly to run harmoniously without affecting the feasible goal. However, to understand this magic tool’s workflows, simply visualize a “To Do Application.” As far as its practicality is concerned – it works on listed tasks such as “to do,” “in progress,” and “done.” The same applicability is related to Jira workflows, although the underlying flow is somewhat complex – beyond the comprehension of a non-technical individual.

On the other hand, Jira’s default workflows are directed through the followings:

  • Task Management – intended for teams’ agile work processes.
  • Project Management – aimed at marking tasks’ statuses precisely.
  • Process Management – reflects on the complexities of work processes.

Besides, those workflows above are deemed as Jira best practices functional in wide-ranging businesses out there. Despite having all the crucial components, Jira further extends its capabilities by helping create backlogs, design sprints, build stories, bugs tracking, tasks management, and effortless and efficient deployments. In total, Jira takes traditional work drills to the next level – bringing along thoroughness, discipline, diligence, and steadfastness into an organization.

Components Of Jira Workflows

As Jira stacks up project related endeavors in a development firm via its full-fledged workflows, it houses defining elements in the workflows that cater to seamless functioning. These workflow components play major and separately specific roles in transporting a task that each team member can view from project creation to completion. So, basically, Jira workflows are comprised of four components. Let’s break them down into details.

1 – Status

The status helps highlight the current station of the task. It allows teams to know the different stages of the task, from the initial to the ending point. For instance, the workflow pinpoints the task status by labeling it – “To Do,” “Not Started,” “In progress,” or “Done.” That’ll give team members essential insights about the task. If it weren’t for its handy features, things would have turned more complex for the team members.

2 – Assignees

This element outlines associated or assigned tasks to the Jira users. Those assignees are solely responsible for the task statuses till its completion, although the assignee may change from station to station in the roadmap. Then, when the tasks are accomplished, the assignees can be removed to have clear slants for the next one. The fact that Jira workflows are wonders in themselves is highly commendable in technical regions.

3 – Transition

When the status keep changing in the project building process from its start to end, transition lets the viewers know the complete discrepancies of the task via linking statuses. And yes, it makes the entire scope of the job in the development cycle super easy. On the bright side, project leads can set certain conditions for the task’s transition – for example, via transition workflow, you can easily grant certain members of the team particular authorities that others don’t have access.

4 – Resolutions

Since Jira is a highly adaptive and flexible tool to project developmental changes, it includes a resolution component mainly built to cater to task conclusions. Simply put, it determines the resulting stages led by the transition. Either “Done,” “Fixed,” or “Not Fixed,” issues are the primary measurements of this component.

Best Practices of Jira Workflows for Businesses

Jira stands as the best tool for agile teams in the technical world. Being a leading-edge technology, it opens up swift workflows to development teams, unlike any. Likewise, that makes it the ultimate and a sure-shot way to boost development lifecycles. Knowing what to do and where to start can be complex and problematic when we have plenty of tools around; however, Jira is equipped with plenty of admirable features and can be combined with various tools to improve project workflows.

Here Is a List of Jira Workflow’s Best Practices for Your Business:

Make Customer-Focused Decisions

Before setting your project in Jira, know that each decision you’ll make should be consumer-centric. Although meanwhile, Jira is a widely known tool for enhancing agile methodologies in the industrial development lifecycle. It’s crucial to make the entire workflow transmissions completely transparent and visible to the adhering project members. In this way, not only are members informed about the project status, but stakeholders also get vital insights about the project progress.

Furthermore, having consumers at the foremost pays off to a great extent – helping prioritize their early needs, demonstrating a clear-cut perspective of the project development journey, and creating backlogs for their super conveniences.

Get Deeper Understanding of Your Audience

The very first rule of the business is understanding your consumers no matter what. If you fail to empathize with your audience, you have a 100% chance of direct failure. Thus, in the business field, understanding consumers are key to escalating a brand’s growth and awareness. We’ve different procedures to sync a brand idea into a consumer’s mind. However, the most vital of all is routing personas to your potential consumers as it is the way to know all the basics of their demands in your project.

Awareness of your target audience reveals valuable insights on initial business conduct and how to grow it further. Well, all of this can be joined together while adopting agile personas for Jira that seamlessly fit into the software so that you can spotlight consumers’ wants on each step.

Don’t Over Customize

That’s right – over-customization can overcomplicate things. In the same way, when you’re working with Jira, always input whatever is required – not too much nor too little. It may create overpouring tasks that may go out of control. Just like I said earlier, do things in the locality of your consumers’ needs – that’s an indisputable fact in the business section. Not to mention Jira is a highly flexible tool that may become compound when proceeded with high customization.

However, when you want to keep the original versions of the project intact, you may as well do less customization while working more with its default settings. To minimize incompatibility issues and increase comprehensibility among your team, ensure they are well aware of the standard practices or well-defined customizations twists.

Bring Stakeholders Onboard

Building projects without onboarding stakeholders can give you and your team a lot of stress. To tackle this issue hassle-free, you need to bring Jira into play, as it’s loaded with lots of workflow features that can do the job quite significantly. In addition, via Jira, you can now continuously handle internal and external stakeholders’ needs. Therefore, utilize Jira’s best workflow practices to meet their requirements on the move.

Just about always, there is a high probability that your stakeholder may suggest changes to the built project. Therefore, if you want to resist such irregularities in your work processes, you need to get stakeholders involved from the starting point, as it helps you catch on with their needs straightforwardly.

Utilize Jira Plugins

Now Agile teams can step up their games right via using Jira plugins. Indeed, this special tool not only unravels and streamlines traditional processes of software businesses but also ensures your project team with a variety of plugins from various sources. More plugins mean improved customization and user-friendly development strategizing. If you have the technical know-how of the Jira plugins or add-ons utilization in your project development lifecycle, your project will experience substantial market growth prospects along with being super impactful after deployment.

In addition, plugins come in very handy when you need diverse functionalities for your projects. Expand your project prospects through nifty Jira plugins.

How to Adapt Jira Workflows for Your Business Unit?

Incorporating Jira workflows into your business is easy, although certain technical skill sets about this software will do just rightly. Now that Jira has the capabilities to edit, copy, own, create, and have lots of other bids, no software development firm would want to avoid this. As far as Jira workflows’ adaptation are concerned, it’s like a walk in the park if you have a technical person on board in your team. And Jira has much to offer its benefits outside of IT departments.

Creating Jira Workflows

To start with Jira workflows, you need to set up Jira software in your systems. Here are steps to create Jira workflows with a breeze.

  • 1. Have Jira Opened Up
  • 2. Go To Issues and Then Select Workflows
  • 3. Tab, The Add Workflow Option, To Create a New Workflow
  • 4. Fill in The Workflow Name and Description
  • 5. The Workflow Is Ready!

Managing Multiple Jira Workflows

Too often, the project undergoes multiple workflows to achieve a feasible goal, while managing them simultaneously can be a bit tricky. If you end up managing various workflows for different tasks, the outcome may be vague – plus, it’ll get messy if you can’t find the roots of each workflow. However, to dodge this bullet, you should design each workflow in a meaningful pattern to know precisely what each of them is for.

In the same way, you might wonder, how can I do just that? Well, we’ve got it covered; here are our top tips to resolve such issues:

  • Find Shared Objectives of Each Project Workflows – Statuses and Transitions.
  • Pay Attention to Workflow Type, Action, Assignees, And Its Relating Features.
  • Use Data or Data-Driven Approach to Categorize Workflows via Status.

Jira Workflow Examples with Templates

From what we can tell, Jira has already gained a great deal of traction in the software development zone. If you are still wondering whether or not to adopt Jira, now is the time to bring more vitality and clear-cut agile development lifecycles into your organization. Jira Workflows can be used in multiple business tasks. And it contributes to diverse business endeavors, from business processes to development workflows.

To help give you a more captivating reason about how Jira Workflows actually work, below is a diagram that gives you some insight about its working.

Business Process Workflow
Development Workflow

Use Case of Jira Workflows for Mobile App Development

Being a software development agency, we utilize Jira Workflows in every developmental roadmap. From project development to deployment, we incorporate Jira to streamline the entire process. In the same, Jira Workflows come in very handy for the following use cases.

  • Initial Development
  • Active Development
  • Dev Smoke Testing
  • Testing – QA
  • Verification
  • QA Fail
  • External Dependency Test
  • Done

And along with those steps, we can track lingering bugs to clients’ requirements quite readily. Thus, your software agency can as well route the mobile app development lifecycle to the finest ladders via Jira workflows till the finishing point.

Conclusion

Jira is not all about tracking issues and creating workflows; it helps bring acing values and convenience into your organization. So, add this magical tool into your business infrastructure for maximum growth probability. Plus, it contains flexible uses that can lead to more productivity in less time span.

Being one of the leading software development agencies, we find Jira a must-have tool for any technical organization. However, at Cubix, our technical experts, who have years of experience, can guide you make seamless developmental decisions along with top-notch applications for any domain.

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Cubix

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