Introduction
Have you ever found yourself starting a new project, picking up a task, and being presented with just a title like: Enable feature in service banana? Unfortunately, Jira tasks or stories without any description are one of the most common occurrences in software development processes. Poorly documented tasks often initiate a chain of clarification efforts and information gathering, which can significantly delay execution and frustrate the developer in charge of the task. Writing well-constructed tasks and properly documenting efforts are essential practices that empower individuals to work effectively, especially when they lack context.
Clarity, Context and Purpose
A ticket / task / Story first and foremost should be clear. What we are trying to solve, what is the business impact of this effort and what we expect when we move it to done to have delivered? Providing context minimizes ambiguity and ensures that team members can approach the task with confidence, rather than spending excessive time inquiring about missing details. So by filling some points like Context, Objective, User Stories/Scenarios, Definition of Done supports immensely the person in charge for executing the task.
A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved.
- Dorothea Brande
Another point of well written stories/tasks is that when the problem is clear the person in charge can empathize more with the problem and also have more motivation once it understands how this work will support the team in reaching team wide business objectives. When the purpose is made clear, it fosters greater ownership, accountability, and engagement from everyone involved. Not to mention that saves time, with everything you need to reason about it, you can focus on thinking about solutions and how to approach the problem rather than question: What is the problem? Repeat again, what is that you want?
Organize thoughts
When writing a Task or Story, it’s important to get your thoughts down on “paper.” This process of writing out ideas and breaking down complexity into structured information is an effective way to validate both the expected behavior of a solution and its value in the context of the project. Personally, I like to explore a problem and its possibilities in a document, such as a simple Google Doc, before structuring it for execution. Sometimes, this helps reveal that the problem is not yet fully understood and needs further clarification or even needs to be broken down into smaller parts.
Encouraging Autonomy and Stories as a Space for Creativity
Remember the scenario I’ve mentioned in the beginning, now imagine you saw a task that seems important in the backlog and you’ve just finished your current task. You go into it and its perfectly described and you can write away start coding to deliver it! You even think about ways of approaching the problem because you have enough evidence and the expected outcomes that its easy to know you’re in the right track. I’ve seem this happen multiple times specially with Tech Debt boards/Epics that suddenly some engineer just opens a PR solving a problem that the team didn’t had throughput because it had some spare time and was able to understand the problem and collaborate with it autonomously.
Effective Jira tasks strike a balance between providing enough information and allowing room for engineers to bring their own solutions to the table. This clarity with the autonomy of being able to drive a task by yourself its a powerful way of empowering the team to collaborate and also leads to a sense of ownership. People feels trusted to make decisions and find solutions, and are more likely to engage more deeply and find new ways of tackling problems.
The Ripple Effect on Team Dynamics and Culture
People are way more susceptible to writing good tasks descriptions when they see lots of them in a project, It follows in a way the broken window theory. Clear, organized, and purposeful tasks spread a culture of thoughtful communication, reducing misunderstandings, minimizing back-and-forth clarification, and ultimately making the team more cohesive, very valuable specially in a remote and async workplace. The team acknowledges the benefit and will try to propagate it.
However we are not perfect and we will forget sometimes to write descriptions and documents, but its ok. In a team that values this behavior also its ok for someone to point it out and you go and improve it! A well-functioning team will auto-regulate, both trying to keep the standards or jumping in to help other clarify efforts and fill in the gaps. #TeamWork!
Experience: Special case for Task Forces and Tight deadlines
One experience I had in the past with couple occurrences were with task forces. Moments of Avengers Assemble and 1-2 months of delivering a big feature or project, well written stories felt almost like 2 more engineering working with the team. Once we had to deliver a big feature for a platform under a tight timeline and 5 people joined my team from different backgrounds and no context of the project, but we together wrote well described with diagrams and clear Definition of Done for Stories. Then, we were able to split a team of 10 engineers into 5 groups that were able to deliver value in parallel and integrate with each other in a month of development, under high pressure of a tight timeline. Most of the communication were to align any blockers and clear out edge cases, the scenarios was so clear that the only thing missing was to code.
Conclusion
Writing effective Jira tasks is an often overlooked but profoundly important aspect of successful software development. Clarity, context, purpose, and an organized approach to writing tasks empower team members, drive creativity, and foster a positive team culture. Sometimes a 15min to write a good story can save more than a day in the future if you’re not the one to take the task to execute. This way even if we forget a couple, they might be a important factor to boost your team empowerment, ownership and efficiency.