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Re: best practices - JIRA fields for the docs team ?
Subject:Re: best practices - JIRA fields for the docs team ? From:Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> To:Monique Semp <monique -dot- semp -at- earthlink -dot- net>, TechWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 17 Dec 2014 11:39:13 -0800
JIRA's for managing and tracking collaboration within a team. I don't
see that a documentation project would have value unless you had a
number of writers collaborating on something complex without major
involvement of engineers.
I create Documentation components in the projects that need
documentation. Mostly I create issues for that component when I need
an SME to provide me with information on a closed issue, or on
something that has no JIRA issue. If I were managing other writers I'd
probably use that component a lot more.
I generally do not use JIRA as a personal to-do list, I do that with
flags in the source. For a big release for which it's hard to keep
track of everything that needs to be documented, I add a
"doc<version>" label.
When an issue for some other component needs documentation, I put a
watch on it so I get email to track its status. If it's particularly
complex, I sometimes create a separate Documentation issue and link it
"blocked by" the related engineering issue(s).
I would like some custom fields to mark which issues are in which
release notes. I forget why I didn't set that up.
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.
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