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Jira board column descriptions and definitions of done

jasehumphr edited this page Jun 7, 2022 · 1 revision

This page describes the purpose of the various columns on the project's Jira board and the criteria for measuring the definition of done for each column.

Ready for discussion

Tickets in this column should have already gone through appropriate requirements analysis, design and user research testing.

This should be an opportunity for the developers to learn the finalised requirements, discuss options for implementation, and identify any potential scenarios that may not have been considered.

For simple, well understood stories, tickets in this column should be sized by the team.

Larger stories may need to be broken down into smaller deliverables.

Stories with more complex technical requirements may need separate tech sessions to to decide on best implementation approach. When there is a high degree of uncertainty about the technical solution, we should consider running a spike to investigate these uncertain areas.

Definition of done

  • Tickets should have an agreed acceptance criteria.
  • All business rules, designs and any additional context from research should be attached to the ticket.
  • Developers should have enough confidence that there is an approach to implementing the story, even if there are still some unknowns (this can be factored into the sizing estimates and worked out during development).
  • Tickets should be pointed (or time-boxed in the case of a spike task).

Ready for dev

The only tickets that should be in this column are:

  • Stories which have been pointed by the team,
  • production defects or issues identified during 9:30 stand up, and
  • blockers to the team's ability to deliver (e.g. broken build pipeline, expired certificates etc.)

Definition of done

  • Developers should pick tasks up from this column as they become available.
  • Tasks should be ordered by priority.
  • Developers should be encouraged to pick up tasks in priority order, not simply cherry pick the tasks they like doing. This will help spread knowledge and develop expertise within the team and reduce bottlenecks when certain individuals are unavailable.
  • Developers should not pick up tasks from this column until they have completed any in-flight tasks they may be working on. If there are blockers to them completing the in-flight tasks, then we should focus on removing those blockers rather than adding additional tasks and increasing the backlog further down the line.

Development

This column should contain tickets actively being worked on. In most cases there should be a maximum WIP limit of one task per developer, but there may occasionally be fewer tickets in this column, for example if developers are pairing up on a task.

Definition of done

  • Acceptance criteria has been met.
  • Adequate automated test coverage is in place.
  • As many pull requests as necessary to implement the tasks have been created.
  • Pull requests should contain a description of the change, some context about why the change is being made and detailed instructions on how to review/test the change.
  • All pull requests have been attached to the Jira ticket.
  • All automated checks/Github Actions build etc have gone green on the pull request. This gives the reviewer some confidence that the change is good. Review should become easier and less burdensome as a result.

Review

Tickets that have met all the definitions of done in the development column should be moved here.

Once in this column, it is the developer's responsibility to get his/her task reviewed by the team since they cannot pick up another task until their card has left review.

Definition of done

  • At least two independent approving reviews verifying the change.
  • All attached PR's should have been approved.
  • All automated checks should be green (because they were green when leaving development)
  • Any review comments resolved and re-reviewed where necessary.
  • All attached PR's merged into the master branch.
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