The article addresses how to effectively manage freelance iOS developers, emphasizing the need of strong connections and precise project definitions.
It emphasizes the advantages of working with freelancers, variations in management from in-house personnel, and best practices for successful freelance collaboration.
This blog also discusses how to become a freelance iOS developer, the skills needed, portfolio development, charge rates, remote working options, and remaining current with new technology.
The necessity of cultural fit and employing skilled freelance iOS developers are also discussed.
Key Jira Concepts
Jira is built on four core concepts: Issue, Project, Board and Workflows.
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Issue: An issue is a single task that you follow from inception to conclusion.
A bug or user narrative both qualify as issues.
It might also be a task for the HR department, an epic, or a paper that your documentation team needs to produce.Some people may refer to issues as tasks, tickets, requests, or tickets.
It is preferable to refer to issues or the specific categories of issues you have defined to minimize confusion.
The Epic Story, Bug, and Test issue kinds are commonly used by product teams.
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Projects: A project allows you to organize your issues and the context that ties them together.
There are numerous ways to configure project-related problems, such as visibility limitations and relevant workflows.
It's helpful to have one project for every product when you use Jira to help with product development.
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Boards: The team's workflow inside a project is shown visually on a Jira board.
You can track, manage, and report on the work being done on the same project flexibly by using multiple boards.
Use a Sprint Board view to display your Sprint Backlog and a Kanban Board view to manage backlog items as they are refined.
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Workflows: A workflow is a process that issues follow as they move through your project, from creation to completion.
A workflow label, such as To Do or In Progress, represents a status an issue can take.
To control the statuses that an issue can move into, you can create workflows.
What Is Jira's History?
Jira was founded as a technical support service. The founders had difficulty initially generating revenue, so they sold the software (Support System), which they had created to help their business, as Jira in 2002.
The founders named their product after the Japanese Godzilla, "Gojira." Coders had previously used Bugzilla, a bug-tracking tool that was available before the development of the tool.
This gave rise to the idea for the name. The founders initially designed Jira to be used by software developers. However, over time, it was adopted by various types of companies.
Host Options For Jira
As per Atlassian's overview of Jira Service Management, there are two hosting options available: cloud-based and self-managed.
Utilize the Jira product management template to streamline project organization and task tracking within your team.
Cloud
Coders.dev sets up and hosts your Jira Software website in the cloud if you use JiraCloud. This is the best option if your goal is to quickly get up and running with Jira Software without having to manage the complex hosting process.
Data Center
Jira data center allows you to host Jira on cloud hosting services such as AWS and Azure. This is the best choice if your enterprise team needs Jira's continuous access and scalable performance.
How To Use Jira Across Multiple Product Groups?
Jira Software is a great choice to scale your initiatives and teams across one product. Jira Software provides a clear view of one project but not multiple projects.
When comparing Jira Product Discovery vs Jira Software, one limitation is that it does not offer a convenient view across multiple projects of the progress and the teams responsible.
Jira created Advanced Roadmaps, an agile roadmapping app that was formerly called Portfolio. The following are key features of Advanced Roadmaps that dedicated jira project managers should be aware of:
- Create a backlog and a roadmap
- Try out 'what if?' scenarios
Advanced Roadmaps were a huge help when scaling up across multiple teams and multiple initiatives within a single product.
Advanced Roadmaps offered us the opportunity to:
- Try out different approaches to break down initiative quickly and find the one that works for you.
- It was very easy to map our epics to portfolio initiatives.
- It was easy to join other teams and team members because it was an environment that was familiar.
- It allows for quick forecasting of effort, needed resources, and delivery plans within a given scope.
- It's brilliant for road maps.
But not all users were impressed. The smart scheduling algorithm has been criticized for being difficult to override and not being very intelligent.
Reviewers can find reviews about the Advanced Roadmaps portfolio in the Coders.dev marketplace.
Advanced Roadmaps can be omitted if you prefer to work with core Jira. This case study on scaling is available at the Coders.dev community forum.
We scaled by creating "micro-teams" out of individuals based on their areas of expertise. They are all members of the same Jira Project, designated Jira Project A.
Since each micro-team has its own scrum board, it can manage its sprints and backlogs. Scrum board Team 1, Team 2, or Team 3 are among the boards available in Jira Project A.
Jira Project A also has a Kanban Board.
The goal is to connect all board-to-board workflow states. Though you can add more, in theory, if an issue is changed from "ToDo" to "InProgress," every board will show the new state.
We utilize labels to display every item on the kanban board and just Team 1 item on the scrum board. Team issues are listed on our kanban board. On our micro team scrum boards, only issues with the label "Team x" are shown.
Jira Feedback Management
Jira is a platform that allows you to organize and vote on feedback. Coders.dev's team members suggest this approach with customers who want to track public feedback.
Jira is used to track bugs and feature requests from customers.
Each issue is a bug or feature request. We use Jira Software to manage our Jira Software projects. These issues can be voted on by other customers.
If the concept for a new feature or product is simple enough, it can be described in a Jira issue. To express a more complex idea, you may make a page on Confluence and link to it from the Jira issues. Jira has its limitations, however, for organizing, tracking, and voting on feedback.
- Voting is restricted to those who have an account on Jira.
You don't need to pay per user.
- Each user within the company can vote only once, so proxy voting for customers is impossible.
- Jira's voting feature is not immediately apparent, so it would be a good idea to explain what you are doing to your team members.
Jira is best used by internal users to vote for a roadmap. You might find it difficult to use even then. If you want to manage feedback in a more effective and strategic manner, an online feedback board with voting capabilities and a Jira integration is an excellent choice.
To test out our feedback boards with Jira Integration, The company offers a free 30-day trial.
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How To Avoid Adding Complexity?
Determine If More Than One Project Is Necessary
Multiple projects can make Jira difficult to use. Do you have multiple projects? You only need to create one Jira Project for your organization.
Widgets, dashboards, and reporting tools can be used to your advantage. You can use other filters to create separate views and slice up different projects.
This approach may be appropriate for smaller organizations, depending on the diversity of your projects. Coders.dev suggests that you use Product Manager HQ to manage multiple platform products and one team per platform.
Each platform should have one Jira Project. Teams can create their own Jira projects. My experience has shown that front-end teams are different from back-end ones.
Having everyone use the same project or structure creates friction. Coders.dev suggests that you use one Jira project to label your team if they are working on all platforms.
Each ticket should be labeled with the platform. You can use labels to create filters that allow your team to quickly see the distribution of work or to give certain types of tickets to individuals with specific skill sets.
Stay On Top Of Your Dependencies
Jira makes it simple and efficient for teams to determine whether tickets depend upon each other by means of issue links, while to quickly address bottlenecks you can use "blocks".
Jira provides more powerful solutions such as this than its more cumbersome "is related" relationship in quickly understanding what needs addressing or not.
Coders.dev recommends creating a technical document in Jira for issue dependencies, which will outline all solutions and goals associated with them.
Your technical document may even act as a useful guide when creating tickets in Jira.
Integrate Jira Into Your Help Desk
If your helpdesk system doesn't yet integrate Jira with Jira, doing so could save both time and effort on both teams' parts - along with making communication between sales and development much smoother.
We use our helpdesk's integration so we can quickly add customer issues directly into Jira so they can report it.
Additional Jira Integrations
All of these integrations were suggested by product managers.
X-Ray For Test Management
X-Ray can support both automated and manual testing, providing quality assurance, software testing, case management and software testing within Jira itself.
Each test is tracked as its own Jira issue with automated functionality enabled through automation capabilities.
Trello Integration For A Visual Perspective
Trello offers the Jira integration (or, "Jira Power-up") which makes life much simpler when working in teams.
You can quickly create Jira issues or connect existing issues directly from Trello cards, also see their status, priority level, assignee information and more details of an issue's progress in Jira.
Bitbucket For Code Management
Bitbucket offers similar integration capabilities as GitHub, making setup straightforward.
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Jira And Product Management
Jira for product management? Jira is an invaluable tool for product managers.
Its flexibility, power and integration with an array of tools make it incredibly adaptable. yet sometimes frustrating when used incorrectly. Coders.dev may prefer that its usage be combined with another tool instead.
In such instances this article aims to show some solutions from product managers around the globe who have addressed similar difficulties through Jira use.
How To Nail Your Jira Product Management Process?
If you have tried to prioritize your product backlog using Jira, raise your hand. That's everyone, right? But has anyone actually done it? Jira product management is like using a hammer to drive in a screw.
Although it will eventually get there, it will be a tedious and difficult process to unravel.
Jira is an excellent development tool. It enables your development team to plan sprints using pre-formatted tickets that make their planning much simpler.
Your job as product manager differs further. here you must oversee both stakeholders and projects while protecting the development team from outside interference.
Product managers must know how to answer this question: "What should we do next?" Jira has proven itself an efficient means of organizing product backlogs.
However, its complexity may prove challenging for developers.
Product managers don't need a long list of things they must build. Rather, they should focus on choosing only those things which make sense and should be built.
Jira simply wasn't built to keep pace with the constant evolution of what you need as your knowledge increases and iterative improvements take effect.
Jira itself shouldn't be seen as the problem - now is the time for split strategy implementation.
Read More:- Tech Product Management Best Practices
How To Build A Jira Product Manager Workflow?
Jira's product management software makes it possible to focus on both components of your process: strategy and execution.
Strategy
Here you identify problems to be solved, set priorities for their resolution and collaborate with stakeholders on finding solutions.
This stage represents your creative phase as it involves gathering all available information in your product backlog and making decisions based on it. Building out roadmaps and validating ideas while planning out what should come next are also central elements in strategy creation and execution.
Jira may not be designed specifically to facilitate this step of your workflow. Therefore, an alternative such as Coders should be more suitable.
Execution
Execution means you work hard and are determined to build. This is the production phase. This is where you set up sprints and manage resources.
This is Jira's forte.
From Strategy To Execution
A tool like Jira, which is geared towards product managers' needs rather than one for dev teams, allows you to distinguish between execution and strategy.
This process allows you to keep control over what is built, and leaves nothing to chance. It addresses one of the greatest problems in product management: leaving important product decisions up to the end, just as the dev team is about to pick up a ticket.
Before you can move on to product management in Jira, make sure your product specifications are solid. Do the ideas have been approved, and are they well-formed? Are developers able to open the task and clearly see what is needed? If you answer yes to these questions, then your product can be pushed to Jira.
Then let the developers do their thing.
Jira can only be used to develop fully-formed ideas if you use another strategy tool. This allows you to work on the next step, while your dev team can focus on what's happening right now.
Jira is no more a place where ideas die.
If you do this right, your dev team will have a clear understanding of what product context is needed. This gives you, as a product manager, the opportunity to create a roadmap for what's in store for the future.
Five Steps To Get Your Strategy Right
Your Roadmap Is Built: Define Your Product Vision And Your Objectives
Never leave the house without a plan for your product. Because exactly where are you going? What kind of value are you attempting to offer your clients? The cornerstone of your product strategy is your product vision.
It will direct all of your choices. This covers your business objectives (also known as OKRs) and the metrics you employ to gauge your success or expansion.
Your vision and objectives are not at the top of your product planning, but they are an integral part of everyday product planning.
These help you focus on the ideas that are most important to your business and make it onto your product roadmap.
Your roadmap will lack a clear focus if it doesn't include a product vision or objectives.
Validate Your Ideas In Your Product Backlog
Always be brainstorming ideas and creating a business case to support your product backlog. This is the start of the validation process.
To understand the business case and why it is important, you must always have one. You run the risk of losing your focus and market fit.
We created a strategy to help you collect ideas using a business plan. Coders.dev questions people who submit new ideas before they create an Idea Canvas.
The Idea Canvas is an effective way to validate ideas. Continue to expand your idea using all of the elements below until you have a product spec that is fully formed.
- Business Case - How will this create value for customers or businesses?
- Impact vs Effort - What is the business's impact, and what does it mean for customers? How big is the project? What is the time commitment? How about training?
- User Stories - What does the user hope to accomplish?
- User personas - Who are you building this?
- Designs - What should the final solution look like?
- Customer feedback -What are customers asking?
The Idea Canvas can also be used to educate your company about the product and provide more information on your backlog.
You Can Find Themes In Your Product Backlog (Still Strategy)
The backlog is not as long as it seems. We call themes the collection of backlog items that end up posing a few problems.
These are the areas you should be focusing on. These themes are the root cause of the problem you want to solve.
Themes help you see the larger picture and show you the extent of the problem. You can reduce the number of ideas you have to manage by identifying themes.
You are not viewing a list of features that need to be created. Instead, you're trying to find answers to an issue.
You must choose which themes to prioritize in your product roadmap once you have identified additional themes. Keep your goals and product vision in mind.
Your product roadmap should be like the following:
Prioritize The Ideas That Are Important (Still Strategy)
It can be difficult to analyze your backlog. There are often many tasks and desires on the list, and it can be difficult to figure out what to do next.
It doesn't have to be like this.
A priority chart made by Coders.dev lets you arrange your backlog in a variety of ways. A concept is represented by each dot in the following priority chart.
The size of the dot reveals how clearly defined the concept is.
The color denotes the most recent update date (hot pink being the most recent). You can use the chart to decide what to do next and where you might soon succeed.
Encourage Your Team To Participate In The Creation Of Product Specifications
Product specifications are a complex process. It requires as much care as possible. You should be more transparent if you work in large companies or with large teams.
This will allow you to provide more context and detail. The more complex the parts, the less you want to allow for the interpretation.
This stage is very important. This stage will bring you unexpected requirements, edge cases, misunderstood functionality, and the realization that you have misjudged the scope.
These issues should be addressed now before you start to develop. Bring together teams and professionals to assist you in developing user stories.
Stakeholder input should be sought.
Participate in debates about products. Develop and test prototypes. Make use of user testing. Jira does not allow you to collaborate with people from your company.
However, it is a valuable tool for your development team.
Developers cannot be efficient if their backlog is full of unfinished product specifications. Once you have done all your research and the product specification is complete, you can finally push Jira.
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Push To Jira
Once you are ready to go, the Jira integration allows you to easily push the work to Jira's dev team. You can still manage the following:
- You have the option to choose how issues are handled by your Jira team.
- Status syncing keeps track of the Progress of issues.
- You can push to Jira for your custom and required fields.
Conclusion
Slowing down people is caused by clogging Jira with the product backlog. This slows down the pace of a busy developer team to go through all these tasks.
It doesn't give you the full picture. Instead of thinking of Jira as the destination, think about Jira in terms of strategy. Once you have a strategy in place, you can start to execute Jira.
Logging into Jira daily will allow you to analyze and prioritize tasks and create new tasks. To ensure that the final product arrives at the customer in a ready-to-use and implementable state, quality assurance will be provided by reviewing and testing the work of team members.
You should hire Jira Project Managers with extensive knowledge of leading teams and projects is what we are looking for.
Jira working knowledge is required. The ideal applicant should be knowledgeable about Jira's processes, bug tracking, report documentation, and other related issues.
Strong organizational abilities, time management, attention to detail, and clear and succinct communication are requirements.
Paul is a highly skilled Full Stack Developer with a solid educational background that includes a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a Master's degree in Software Engineering, as well as a decade of hands-on experience. Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, and Agile Scrum Master bolster his knowledge. Paul's excellent contributions to the software development industry have garnered him a slew of prizes and accolades, cementing his status as a top-tier professional. Aside from coding, he finds relief in her interests, which include hiking through beautiful landscapes, finding creative outlets through painting, and giving back to the community by participating in local tech education programmer.
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