It\u2019s fun to go on a merry-go-round when you are five. But for a thirty-something project manager, the \u201cjoy\u201d of merrily doing the same thing over and over again is more akin to flashbacks from \u2018em cheesy 90\u2019s action flicks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Think about starting a new development project, for example. You have some fresh ideas, an actionable plan, and the drive to make a damn good product. Then you go to Jira to set everything up, and the tedious processes you\u2019ve repeated dozens of times across multiple projects literally sucks the will to live out of your hardworking body. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And don\u2019t get this wrong, I\u2019m not saying that every project is the same. There\u2019s definitely a unique recipe to making them purr like a 78 Chevy Chevelle, but the basic building blocks are always the same. Moreover, if your company has been doing development long enough, you\u2019ll have established workflows and processes that have proven their efficiency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fortunately, Jira has a lot of the tools you\u2019ll need to automate the routine. And if there\u2019s something that doesn’t come out of the box – the odds are you\u2019ll find a viable option on the Atlassian Marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was talking about the problem of repetitive setups in Jira with Marlene Kegel from codefortynine<\/a> sometime last week, and it turns out she had a similar issue when working in a game dev company. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When their objectives shifted to reliably delivering more games, a solution was needed to both automate and standardize the process. That\u2019s not an easy feat to achieve, yet they had to start somewhere. So they started with Confluence and created a document where they gathered the requirements and the to-dos from every team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After the necessary data was put into this confluence document, it was transported into Jira project with Stories that reflect the requirements. And the Jira project, in turn, became a template for further projects as the team used the Deep Clone<\/a> Jira add-on to clone it when needed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Deep Clone is a Jira add-on that can bulk clone up to 100,000 issues or entire company-managed projects, including settings, versions, components, and issues. Some of the add-on’s most common use cases are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n In our case, Marlene and her team used Deep Clone to turn the Project that’s comprised of 50 Stories – give or take – into a template that clearly describes (standardizes) the desired outcome. You can read more about this case on the Atlassian community forum.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Obviously, there\u2019s more to it than haphazardly slapping a bunch of Stories into a Project and calling it a day. A series of stories aren\u2019t worth much without context. You\u2019ll still need to populate a lot of them with content, acceptance criteria, and links to relevant documentation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s when an additional layer of automation can be introduced into a template project – checklist templates. They are an excellent tool when the context of a story or an issue is not subject to change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s take an onboarding ticket as an example. A new employee will always need to go through the same series of steps. My team uses Smart Checklist for Jira<\/a> to populate template onboarding tickets with the steps a person needs to complete, like signing into their account, setting up two-factor verification, or reading through the necessary documentation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
Enhance the project template with more context within stories and issues<\/h2>\n\n\n\n