JIRA and prioritization / ordering – Agile and Scrum Master tips

JIRA, Greenhopper, Agile, project planning, tasking, reporting, sprint planning and similar words are my daily bread. I spend most of my time checking progress on multiple fronts. The number of tasks that I have to review and keep track of has grown to a level that is a little bit over the capabilites of a regular human being. Organization is key, the devil is in the details and if you fail to prepare you better prepare to fail.

That’s why I identified so much with James O. Coplien with his It’s Ordered — Not Prioritized! article.

My favorite way of structuring the work assigned to developers in JIRA is to sort out by fixversion using either the GreenHopper plugin or bulk change via the Issues pane and then simply sit down with the dev, estimate the duration of each task and then set the due date so that we both agree in which order they are going to be working on their tasks.

The due date is a guide, and although it is not written in stone, we need to try to reach our objectives. That’s why estimating is so important!

Here is a sample of the tasks for a specific developer in the order in which he needs to work on them:

And also the most important part, focus on the task at hand and try to finish it first. Seven tasks in progress that are “almost complete” don’t count as one!

So, how do you prioritize your work?