Jira best practices

While Swarmia adapts to any kind of Jira configuration, we wanted to share an example that's easy to set up.

Our recommendation tries to strike a balance. This ensures data quality while also leaving room for teams to customize their workflows.

Jira projects

Create one Jira project per team. This is also what Atlassian recommends.

If that's not possible, use a Custom Field to assign issues to teams.

Issue types

Use a hierarchical structure for roadmap work. For example, Epic -> Story -> Sub-task.

Outside of the hierarchy, you'll likely have Bugs and Tasks.

Teams can create their own issue types.

Workflow statuses

Teams can customize their workflows as they want. It's good to start from a standard To Do -> In Progress -> Done, but it's common to add your own steps. You can normalize across statuses in the Swarmia settings to account for how teams work.

Labels

Use labels to automatically sort work, rules can be adjusted and manually overridden in Swarmia as needed. For someone using the Balance framework, this could be New things, Existing things, Productivity, and KTLO (Keeping The Lights On).

Configuring Swarmia

Swarmia's Jira mapping will convert complex workflow statuses and issue types into a simplified model. We will also map projects to teams and user identities between different systems.

These best practices allow you to create a simplified Investment Category configuration:

• Epics and Stories go to New Things by default
• Bugs and Tasks go to Keeping The Lights On
• Labels can be used to categorize more granularly, for example categorizing a Story as Improving Productivity.

Please don't worry if these practices aren't used across all teams. Swarmia makes team-specific customizations very easy.