Writing good user stories that capture the needs and detail acceptance criteria takes time and thoughtfulness. I am going to share with you how to make these tasks easier and faster. The need for someone to copy and paste, or even create manually, issues into Jira that come from a document is a horrible waste of resources and efficiency. Collaborating on the proposed user stories to refine the list in Confluence with your team before deciding to put them into Jira can be significantly rewarding once development begins.
Visualization and Use
Did you know you might not ever have the need to write Jira issues – user stories at least? Atlassian has made it easier to take your well-developed user stories right into Jira. It can even contain details in the Epic you’ve already created, and acceptance criteria put into the description field of your user story for you.
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Let’s start with creating your Product requirements page in your Confluence instance – it does mean you need to already have a Confluence space setup, that can be selected. You’ll create a new page in your space, and be prompted to use a template or a blank page. We’ll use the Product requirements template. If you are unfamiliar with creating Product requirements documentation, this is a pretty good jumping off point.
Now that this page is created, you’ll see on the top of your page that the page title and other page properties are left blank for you to fill in – except for the creator which is automatically placed as the Document owner – which can be changed.
Some of the most important elements that you’ll enter into your new Product requirements page are the Page title and the Epic. You can input the Epic directly from Jira by using the Jira macro. Members of the project can be added using the @ tag. Using a single Epic on your Product requirements page goes along with the Jira structure. You might consider titling the page with the Epic summary to keep things aligned. I encourage all team members to be added to this page so that when and if changes are made the team members will be notified via email.
Members of the project can be added to this page using the @ tag. And it helps to add all relevant team members to this so they are notified via email of any changes. I encourage all team members to be added to this page so that when and if changes are made the team members will be notified via email.
Now for the really good part. Near the midsection of our page is the requirements table. This is where, as the PM, you’ll spend your time developing your user stories and acceptance criteria. You’ll notice the default table does not have a column for acceptance criteria. I encourage you to add that column, as you see in the following image. We will show how that can be used later on.
Adding the acceptance criteria will help, not only within your requirements page but also when creating your user stories. You can see where the column has been added and populated with some examples.
Creating a single story, or multiple, from this point, is fast and simple. Once you save (publish) your document, you can highlight one of the stories in the User Story column and select “Create JIRA Issue”.
You’ll see that the default is only going to create a single user story. You can select “Create multiple issues from table” and Confluence will create user stories for all the items found in your table, under the User Story column.
By selecting the multiple issues option, and your project, you can see both of the user story examples will be created with the option for the issue type and the ability to place them in the Epic – by selecting the “Link to epic” box – that you specified, in the Page Properties section.
The Summary and Description can be selected from any of the table headings you have in your table. You will also notice in the image below that the Jira Summary is required, while the Description is not. This is where the addition of the Acceptance Criteria column in your table now comes in handy. These will be automatically added to your user stories once created.
After making your selections, and hitting the Create button, your Jira issues will be created and the issues will display, with their status, in your table. In edit mode, you can edit the Jira link and choose to hide or show the summary. The summary is of course already in your table, but you may choose to modify that.
Your Jira issues have been created. You will now be able to prioritize, assign, and monitor the stories you’ve created from Confluence in Jira. You can see in the image below that the Summary, Epic, and the acceptance criteria, in the description field, have been added to your Jira issue automatically from Confluence, saving time and effort.
Your Jira issue is also automatically linked back to your Product requirements document.
You will also notice that your Epic has been updated to reflect the document link, as well as the issues that are within this Epic.
There are several features built into Confluence that assist areas in standing out, such as sections that need emphasis to the reader. Utilizing these in your documents helps bring attention where it is needed, and assists in communications across your team. An example would be using {status} (you can use the left curly brace shortcut to easily insert this and other macros into your document) being repurposed to represent your priority within your Confluence page. You can include {status} or other macros in your document by using curly braces.
Doing It Well
And as you explore these time-saving integrations, it helps to keep the good practice in mind when developing user stories:
- The end user comes first.
- Use personas when describing user activity and needs..
- Write user stories collaboratively.
- Do your best to keep them simple and concise.
- Include acceptance criteria.
- Keep them readily accessible to others, in Jira or otherwise.
- Consider the user journeys and interactions, visual design, and non-functional properties when developing user stories.
Conclusion
When this is done well, creating the stories into Jira with these steps removes a huge amount of confusion and misunderstanding. Your stories can be easily prioritized, assigned, monitored and worked, all using the Jira and Confluence partnership.
Utilizing the synergy between Confluence and Jira together will help your effectiveness and efficiency. Gathering all the information needed for your team members to share and collaborate will increase their overall effectiveness. The better you are at taking advantage of these built-in benefits, the greater the chance for your team to produce high-quality projects.
