Creating professional Documents with Jira

[Jonathan von Wittern]

Hello,

one big question. Is it possible to create CI conform documents with Jira or any Plug-In? Documents like product concept cataloque, requirments specification, design specification, test plan, Testspecification and test result. Important for me are different things. Unique placement of issues in one document. An issue can never be place inside twice documents. The document shall include a CI conform head sheet, a change history, a table content, a figure content, a content a all and the possibiliy to include extra text, figures, tables as well as issues. The presentation of issues should be detailed and not in table view. The field members of the detail view should be configurable. Must have field are ID, title, description, workflow status, back linked and linked issues, assignee.

Nice feature would be to export the created documents in word and the documents can be exported in word and inported later back to Jira with its changes and Jira can regognized the changes and update its database.

I need a function for baselining these created dokuments at any time during the project runtime.

At the moment I see Jira more as a tool for agile developement processes but I need this tool for projects for the medical market and for the areospace market with a huge documentation part. These two markets are often doing development with a V-Model or a Waterfall model as development process. Th design the workflow for these two development process models is not a problem for me. The problem is the documentation and creating CI conform dokuments.

Has anybody an idea how to do this or what I need to do this?

Best regards

Jonathan von Wittern

[Jonathan von Wittern · Accepted solution]

Hello,

i was vistiting the community day in Munich and I got some answers from the project manager as well as from other users and administrators. I think Jira is the wrong tool for such a kind of work. Difficult to report this to my general manager...

...best regards

Jonathan

[Henning Tietgens]

If you have all the information stored within JIRA issues maybe you could use JIRA PDF View Plugin to create the needed documents.

[Jonathan von Wittern]

IT is a beginning but not a word format - has anybody experience with this Plug-In? Is there an adequate Plug-In wor word documents, too?

[Midori]

JIRA PDF View Plugin does not support the Word fileformat, but it does support all your formatting and content requirements.

(Re-import is not possible though.)

Baselining the PDF documents should actually be done outside JIRA. Any advanced document management system, like Alfresco for instance, should be able to satisfy this requirement.

[Jim Reynolds]

You have to make the documentation as part of the Agile flow. It cannot live outside of Agile. You have to do it inside the Jira ID (Bug or Story) You can use Sub-task OR create documentation field(s) inside the Jira form and transition screens. You cannot create a new Jira ID for Docs and link it to the Bug or Story, the Developers will not go to it. I have tried several ways and I ended up with this method.

I purchased a module from a company called GetCider (getcider.com) called Dynamic Documentation. This product uses Dynamic Forms and JQL queries to automatically create HTML Release Notes in real time from Jira IDs. I love this product and every team said it has made their documentation task so much better.

There are fields that the Developers fill out regardless if the Jira ID needs to be documented or not and is REQUIRED. The fields are called Developer Notes and is best practices. This information is used by QA for testing and the Product Owner. This should be required information for QA to properly test. These fields feed into the Release Notes and are modified for external viewing when added to the Release Notes by the Developer, QA and Product Owner.

For Bugs the fields are…

Developer Notes: Affected Areas

Developer Notes: Impact Analysis

Developer Notes: How Dev tested it

Developer Notes: Root Cause 

The Product Owner, Developer or QA Engineer answers the question “In Include in Release Notes” Y/N When they select Yes they select the type (Fixed Defect, Known Issues, Enhancement, Limitation or New Feature. The JQL query will pull this into the specific area of the HTML Release 

We configured the JQL query to only display Closed items. Now that we made it part of the workflow and the QA Engineer should do a final scrub of the Release Notes. The Technical Writer will review once the Jira ID is Closed. The Product Owner owns the full feature description. 

The Developers, QA and Product Owners are documenting each Bug or Story as the move them through the workflow and the Technical Writers do the final review, audit and corrections. 

You need to define what goes into the Release notes as this responsibility is now everyone. For example 

Fixed Bugs in Release Notes

Fixed Bug is Linked to a Support/Field issue

Fixed Bug changes UI or functionality

Fixed Bug changes UI or functionality   

Known issues or limitations

NON Closed Bug linked to a Support/Field issue

NON Closed Bug is NOT Linked to AND the Severity is Critical or High AND is pre-existing or introducing with the Release

Non Closed Bug with new features(s) should be demoed and agreed upon with the Product Manager  

I can’t go into all of the features of the GetCider tool (Dynamic Release Notes) but it has solved some big headaches for us.    

[Jan Stähle]

@Jonathan von Wi - did the proposal of @Jim Reynolds  address your requirements or did you find another solution, since I am facing the exact same question right now? 

[Reagan Penner]

I think this is a very interesting topic. We are noticing more and more teams within our organization who need to follow an ASPICE process (ASPICE uses the already mentioned V-Model).

From the latest post on this topic it seems that if your team is following a pure Agile development process than a lot of the ASPICE artifacts should be producible from your Jira work products i.e., Tasks, Stories, Epics, Bugs, ...

However, where I see things breaking down, where storing and collecting ASPICE data from Jira become more difficult is when your team is more Waterfall than Agile and is simply using Jira to track development tasks. In this scenario a lot of the ASPICE data will be difficult to capture in Jira and therefore almost impossible to get out of Jira.

We are currently trying to setup an Atlassian based ASPICE process using Jira, Confluence, R4J and Xray. Some of the major challenges that we are facing include:

• capturing live documents in Jira i.e., a System or Software architecture document that you can link into and out of.
• Baseline and or version the project artifacts i.e., snap a baseline of all requirements at a certain point in time and than the ability to roll back to that point in time.

I am very interested in hearing from others in the industry who are or have achieved ASPICE with Atlassian products.

Cheers,

Reagan

[Jonathan von Wittern]

Hello, this doesn't answer my questtion, too. Sorry but I need not any option for documentation. I need exactly the option I descriped at the begining of this ticket. None of the answers solve my requirements. Is there any advanced idea left?

Best regards

Jonathan

[Azfar_Masut]

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[Daniel Borcherding]

Jonathan,

Have you looked at Confluence. Specifically Confluence Blueprints.

http://blogs.atlassian.com/2013/03/confluence-blueprints-collaboration-best-practices/

[Jonathan von Wittern]

The question is still not answered well!

[Jonathan von Wittern]

I'm sorry but none of this suggestions is able to create professional documents as development requires. Any other idea?

[mwarton]

Hi Jonathan,

You can also check out Intelligent Reports. It lets you design your report document in Microsoft Word and fill in the data including multiple issues, tables, charts etc. with simple point and click rules. Output is produced in Microsoft Word format, and there is no scripting or API to learn, so you can get up and running very quickly.

Intelligent Reports does not currently support updating JIRA from changes to the document, but you could easily use Words track changes or document comparison features to see changes and update the JIRA information manually.

There is a 30 day free trial and several sample reports included, so check it out and let us know (via support) if it meets your needs.

[Xpand IT]

Hi Jonathan,

We have several examples of that kind of templates. Check http://jiraxporter.xpand-it.com/display/JIRAXPORTER/Sample+Templates, files SampleBulk*.

If you have any questions, raise them directly at https://jiraxporter.zendesk.com, we will be glad to help with any questions or issues.

Best Regards

[Steve Gerstner [bridgingIT]]

Try this:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.xpandit.plugins.jiraxporter

Regards

Steve

[Jonathan von Wittern]

Okay thanks for your answer,

but how shall this xpandit plug-in handle with a template bases content and extra headers and text between the issues by using a buld exporting?

Regards

Jonathan