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Tips on working with a User Story Map and Jira

  • 4 August 2022
  • 8 replies
  • 1003 views

Ok, so a User Story Map is a beautiful thing - thanks Jeff Patton!

And thanks Miro for having a great template / element to enable working with story maps and cards!

 

So, you create a great user story map in two dimensions in Miro. Lots of talking with the team and customers and you’re all happy and understand better how the product is to work and what things you want to built first. Its all on the map

Then, things start to break down when you now have to move these stories from the map to Jira. Why? Well, because your company uses it and some of your CI/CD tools integrate to it and there’s commenting possibility and… uh

Problems:

  • Priority / rank, indicated on the story map is lost as you have to put everything to a flat backlog in Jira. When you look at Jira, you can’t be sure if the thing at the top of the flat backlog is the one yo should be working on, without double-checking the map in Miro
  • If you have made a nice story description in Miro, you now have a duplicate in Jira and can’t tell which one is the master if (when) you need to make changes
  • If you want to know what you should be working on, which one do you check first - the map in Miro or the backlog in Jira?
  • It’s a lot of manual copypasting of content and links

How do YOU work around these problems? In particular the rank is a pain!!

8 replies

K
Userlevel 1

Some ideas I came up with, but still interested in your thoughts.

 

Use Jira Cards integration to partially solve the duplication problem

  • still need to decide if the content is maintained in Jira or Miro (not both)

Forget the rank in Jira, just use it as a status tracker / commenting function (don’t create any boards, just a project)

Nick_Miro
Rank
Userlevel 4
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Hi @Kimmo J Kyle 

Thanks for asking your question! Jira cards integrations allows you to edit content in both: Miro board and Jira. Whenever you change something in the description in one source, it will get updated automatically in the second source. This means that it doesn’t matter much where you maintain you content, because it gets synced all the time. Here is an example:

 

Does this answer your question? Thanks for using Miro!

K
Userlevel 1

Hi @Kimmo J Kyle 

Thanks for asking your question! Jira cards integrations allows you to edit content in both

Does this answer your question? Thanks for using Miro!

 

Hey Nick, thanks! That solves ~50% of the problem. Obviously the more advanced Jira fields or comments don’t sync but that can be lived with.

The other problem is the “rank” but might be solvable with the solution I suggested to myself above. Can’t think of anything else.

Nick_Miro
Rank
Userlevel 4
Badge

Hey @Kimmo J Kyle,

Do you mean the Priority by writing “rank”? If yes, you can change the priority of a Jira card while on a Miro board. This priority will then be reflected (synced) in Jira. If that’s not what you meant, could you please send a screenshot of “rank” so that I understand your point better?

 

K
Userlevel 1

Not “Priority” as in the useless Jira field which says “low, medium, high, highest, even higher”😅

..I mean the order of items in the backlog top to bottom, which is called Rank in Jira

Nick_Miro
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Userlevel 4
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@Kimmo J Kyle

I’ve found in Jira Knowledge Base that users can Rank an issue by dragging and dropping it to a higher or lower position in the Scrum or Kanban backlog.

In other words, tasks can be re-ranked only via Jira as it only depends on user’s preference. I mean, you don’t assign any variable to a task while dragging. Which means there isn’t any data that Miro can send to Jira for “auto-ranking” Therefore, I am afraid the only option to rank your tasks is - to do it manually via Jira UI. I am sorry for that.

What I see is that you can assign Priority to cards on Miro boards, so it’s easier to rank them in Jira. I understand you don’t really like Priority (😄), yet it may actually help you in the process of ranking.

Also, I’ve passed this (interesting) case to our Tech Team. The will discuss is in detail in Q3 or Q4. Yet it would be great if you add it to the Wish List!

Thanks for using Miro!

K
Userlevel 1

Thanks Nick! In the meantime my solution is just to ignore the rank in Jira and go with what’s on the story map.

R

Hello, I’ve been using the user story format and just converted the cards into tickets in JIRA. However, there were comments the squad had added on each card that have no disappeared and I can’t see them in resolved comments. Does anyone know how I could get these back please? 

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