5 Jira Use Cases for Business Analysts

Did you know that, according to a recent study, Atlassian Jira is a leading tool for enterprise Agile Planning? There are many contenders out there, but Jira is the de facto number one tool for backlog and scope management that business analysts use.

Even if you are not using Jira at the moment, your knowledge of this tool will highly benefit you as a BA.

In this article I’ll share 5 main use cases that will help you get started with Jira as a business analyst

Before we go further, don't forget to download the Scrum Cheat Sheet for IT Business Analysts that comes along with a free video tutorial!

Free Scrum Cheat Sheet for Business Analysts

Use Case # 1 - Manage Product Backlog

Once you start a new project in Jira, your backlog is going to be empty, and you’ll need to fill it out. But before this, you need to decide on how you want to see and structure your product backlog, meaning what tickets and issue types you want to have.

In the default configuration, you get the following issue types in a Scrum project in Jira:

• Story

• Bug

• Epic

• Task

• Sub-task

You may enhance this default configuration by adding more issue types depending on your specific needs. Most often, we see the addition of an issue type called “Feature” as an intermediate level between Epics and User Stories. Your project admin can do this by adding a new issue type to your project configuration. However, if you’re new, my recommendation will be to stick to the default configuration.

To view and manage your backlog, you need to navigate to your project, and then in the Planning panel choose Backlog. Here you’ll be able to see the list of user stories in your backlog and also see how they are grouped by epics.

To add new tickets into your backlog click the Create button at the top of the backlog list to add stories or other tickets to the backlog. And after that, edit your newly created stories, add more details, or link stories to other tickets.

After you have stories and epics added to the backlog, then you can assign specific user stories to epics.

Use Case # 2 – Plan Development Sprints

Of course, putting tickets into the backlog is not enough to build the product and organize the work of the team. To do this, you need to organize stories in your backlog by development sprints. And for this, you first have to create development sprints, and then assign stories to those sprints.

To add a sprint, go to the right corner of your backlog list and click Create sprint. Jira will create a new sprint placeholder for you, and by the way, you can create a few sprints right away and see how Jira automatically assigns numbers to these sprints, which is very handy.

Then, click Add dates or select Edit sprint under 3 dots at the top right corner of the sprint, and adjust the Sprint name, Duration, and the dates for your upcoming sprint. Most importantly, specify the Sprint goal. This goal will determine which development tickets and user stories you want to include in this sprint.

Now that you have added placeholders for our sprints, it's time to actually fill the sprints with user stories. And you can do it in multiple ways. You can simply drag and drop stories from the backlog to sprints. (Here you can select one or multiple stories for it). Besides drag and drop, you can select the stories you want to move, do right click and in the popup panel select Move To, and choose the sprint you want. Lastly, you can go to the details of a specific story, scroll down to the Sprint this story is assigned to, and change it from this dropdown.

Use Case # 3 – Enhance Productivity with Bulk Change

Another great thing in Jira is the mass update of multiple tickets at once, known as Bulk Change.

Why would I want to do Bulk Change? Well, for many reasons. Let’s say I want to change the status of 10 user stories that we just approved with the client, or add a UAT label to them, or whatever else.

For this, I can stay in the Backlog view, select the issues that I want to update, do the right mouse click, and select Bulk change.

Then I need to choose the specific bulk action; let’s say I want to edit the labels on the selected tickets, so I select Edit Issues on this screen.

Out of the many fields that I see, I need to choose what exactly I want to change. I’ll go to the Change Labels section, leave the “Add to existing” default option here, and then just start typing and adding labels that I want to add to my tickets.

Once I’m done, I’ll scroll down and select Next. On the next screen, I need to preview the upcoming changes to the fields and the list of tickets these changes will be applied to.

Once all is good, I hit the Confirm button, and then Jira will get me to this Bulk Operation progress screen.

It will take some time to do the bulk changes; once it’s all done, I'll hit the Acknowledge button and get navigated to my backlog

Use Case # 4 - Use Boards to Track Business Analyst's Progress in Jira

Another great use case for Jira is to organize and track your team’s progress, either in the current sprint or getting ready for upcoming sprints. And for this, we use Jira Boards.

I personally like using Jira Boards to organize the work on user stories for the upcoming sprints between business analysts. To do this, navigate to your Planning panel, hit this dropdown icon, then scroll down and select Create board.

Then for my purposes, I choose to create a Kanban board.

On the next screen, I select the option called Board from an existing project and click Next.

Then I give my board a name. It’s going to be called “BA Sprint Readiness”. I select my current Project and the same project in the Location dropdown. Click Create board, and Jira does the magic and creates a new board for me.

Now, to customize it a little, I’ll click the 3 dots in the top right corner and select the Configure board option.

There are plenty of things that I can do to customize the board, but I want to add more columns to my board. So I'll go to Columns settings, and then add a column for “Draft Stories”, “In Review”, and “Approved”. Then I’ll rearrange the order of these columns using drag and drop.

Next, I click Back to board at the top right corner.

From there, I can start assigning stories to individual BAs, or they can do it themselves. The stories that are already picked up and BAs are working on them I'll move from TO DO to DRAFT STORIES. For those stories that were sent for formal review to the client or the product owners, we’ll move to the IN REVIEW column. And for those that have already been approved we’ll move to the APPROVED column.

Use Case # 5 – Connect Jira to Confluence

Another use case that many teams adopt is putting the actual requirements specifications, data models, wireframes, and so on in Confluence, a specialized content tool by Atlassian, and then connecting Jira and Confluence.

Why do teams do this? Because Confluence naturally has superior formatting, storing, archiving, commenting, and other content management capabilities than Jira.

For example, I can have a user story ticket in Jira but store the actual requirements specifications for this story in Confluence. What I'll do is go to Confluence, create a page, and put all my specification content there. Here, I can use very advanced formatting and leverage some really cool widgets that Confluence offers.

To connect this specification to my ticket in Jira, I'll do one super simple thing. I'll edit this Confluence page and post a hyperlink to my Jira ticket, then save the changes.

Now, when I go to my ticket in Jira and refresh it, you'll see there’s now this “Confluence” section with a “mentioned on” list.

Now, if I'm a developer working on this ticket, I know that the actual requirements specification is stored in Jira, and to access it, I need to simply click this link. So it’s super easy.

Thank you!

I hope you find these tips useful and please let me know how they work for you!

Thanks,

Sergey