How do we use JIRA?

Many teams in our department have adopted the practice of tagging relevant stories with the keyword “Estimation” when answering this question. This makes it easy to add a gadget to a dashboard that displays only the stories tagged with “Estimation” (see also https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira064/adding-the-filter-results-gadget-720416922.html

Example of a filter query:

project = "Hello World" AND labels in (Estimation, estimation) AND status != closed ORDER BY Rank DESC

Since we don’t always have time to discuss all the stories during estimation, we’ve expanded the filter view to include the “Sprint” field and sort by it. This way, we discuss the stories that would be implemented next first. Technically, JIRA should have already handled this sorting for us via the filter query with the “order by rank desc” parameter. However, that hasn’t always worked. Maybe one of you has a tip on this.

In Grooming, we sometimes ask ourselves whether a story is ready to be moved into the sprint or if there’s still work to be done on it. In these cases, it helps to display the keywords in the backlog overview. This way, we can see right away which stories are scheduled for estimation.

The downside of this solution, of course, is that you have to add the “Estimation” tag to every story. Tagging stories for an estimation has always worked very well in this way. We had issues in some teams with removing the tags after an estimation. In my current team, there’s now someone who removes the tag immediately during the estimation meeting once a story has been discussed.

How do you answer the question about which stories are pending for estimation? I recently stumbled across the Atlassian documentation on flagging stories. Does anyone here use this mechanism?
https://confluence.atlassian.com/agile/jira-agile-user-s-guide/working-with-issues/flagging-an-issue

Another question I’ve encountered in every team so far: How are we actually doing with story preparation? Is everything ready for the next sprint?

I find it very helpful to work with a customized workflow in Jira:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira064/configuring-workflow-720412524.html

In my current team, we use the statuses “open,” “in discovery,” and “ready for development” for story preparation.

• "Open" – the story has been created and already has a title and some initial information we had on hand; other than that, nothing else has happened yet
• “in discovery” – beyond just creating the story, we’re working on its content, gathering screens and information, handling story splitting, conducting estimations, etc.
• “ready for development” – the story has been presented at least once during estimation and there are no more open questions that need to be clarified before implementation begins

In the backlog, we color-code the story cards based on their status:

When preparing stories, our goal is therefore to get the stories “green.” From the backlog view, this gives us a quick overview of which stories still require work:

In Sprint 2, there is still some work to be done on Story 15. It is not yet green. The story also already has the tag “Estimation.” It is therefore very likely that all open questions have been resolved, and it can be discussed in the final estimation meeting and then set to “ready for development.” Stories 13 and 14 in the backlog are still gray. So these were created, but no further work has been done on them.

In another project, unfortunately, our team had no way to customize JIRA’s standard workflow. If you find yourself in this predicament as well, using keywords as a workaround might help. We tagged stories that were “ready for development” with the keyword “sprintready” and displayed this in the backlog.

In my current team, we have an average of about twenty stories per sprint. This makes the backlog view quite long, and it’s hard to get an overview at a glance. That’s why we’ve added another gadget to our dashboard as an additional view: the two-dimensional filter statistics (https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira061/jira-user-s-guide/customizing-the-dashboard/adding-the-two-dimensional-filter-statistics-gadget)

We use "Status" for the x-axis and "Sprint" for the y-axis. The corresponding filter might look like this:

project = "Hello World" AND issuetype in (Story) AND Sprint in (futureSprints())