How do you create user stories and tasks in Jira / GreenHopper?

Question

We are using Jira / GreenHopper to run our sprints on a Scrum team. The fact that Jira is a bug tracking tool and GreenHopper is a Scrum-ish add-on is becoming painfully apparent.

We want our Product Owner to enter user stories in Jira/GreenHopper and have the team hang technical tasks onto the user stories. How does one do this? Jira/GreenHopper does not seem to have any notion of user stories with tasks. Is this correct or am I missing something?

Also, we want the task board in Jira/GreenHopper to track the user stories and tasks as they move from To Do to Done. Again, there seems to be no way to do this. A User Story is Done when all of its tasks are done. Tasks should be able to move from To Do to Done while the User Story is In Progress. Are we correct in thinking that the Jira/GreenHopper task board cannot do this?

I am generally interested in any thoughts, books, tutorials, etc. on how to use Jira/GreenHopper to solve the above issues.

Answer 1

A lot has to do with how you set the tool up. Jira only allows one level of sub-task, so you'll have to make the Task type a sub-task type. That will allow you to associate the sub-task to the Story. When I had Jira/GreenHopper on a project in the past, there were a lot of manual steps that I had to take to get it set up--but it was exactly the way I wanted. The installation is a lot easier now, but you lose some of that insight from doing the configuration yourself. Check out the following guides to get things customized the way you want:

• http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/GH/GreenHopper+101
• http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/GH/Specifying+your+Project+Templates
• http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/GH/Setting+Up+Epics+for+your+Project

I wish I could do better than this. Jira is very configurable, and their online help is usually pretty responsive in my experience.

Answer 2

In addition to what Berin notes, stories can be moved to done:

• Visually on the task board, by using the Compact task-board mode. (This mode can be turned on through Views: Task Board Modes: Compact(Kanban).)
• Via the "Resolve Issue" and "Close Issue" workflow-steps available on the story detail pane.