If you’re looking to get started with Jira requirements management, this guide is for you. Figuring out how to manage requirement specifications in Jira is one of the trickier and most frustrating things you can do on the platform.
There are different ways to do it, and you have to bring in several moving pieces to create an effective requirements management system for your projects. But, you’ll be pleased to know it doesn’t have to be complicated.
In this guide, we want to break it down for you and help you understand how you can manage requirements in Jira. To top it up, we’ll walk you through some best practices to guide your requirements management process.
But first, let’s define requirements management so we’re on the same page from the start.
What is requirements management?
Projects mobilize resources and efforts to serve a need. For example, a company that owns payment gateway software might realize that its customers need a better experience from their app.
This is what will push them to create a project (or story or epic) for the same. Since these needs are abstract and can also change at any time, project teams might struggle to know if they’re properly addressing these needs. This is where requirement specification comes in.
Requirements are a way to concretely lay out these needs so that teams know if they’re properly addressing them with their work. Therefore, requirements management is the process of defining, documenting, and managing the needs or expectations of a project or product. It involves:
- Maintaining them in a repository where teams and stakeholders can access them.
- Tracing them – seeing how requirements are linked to each other.
- Prioritizing the requirements that suit a project’s immediate needs.
- Assessing and approving changes – if there’s a change in requirements that significantly impacts the project, you can assess and approve it.
Why is requirements tracking important?
If you want your team to deliver successful projects or products that accurately meet the needs they were created for, you must manage their requirements. With clearly defined requirements, everyone involved in the project understands what needs to be done and why.
When requirements change, everyone will be up to speed in real-time. This will prevent situations where, if something goes wrong, people start blaming others, saying they didn’t know the requirements changed.
What’s more, it enables your projects to run smoothly. You can spot risks early, act against them, and prioritize tasks to use your resources efficiently. The bottom line is that managing requirements ensures your final product meets expectations and avoids reworks, delays, and going above your budget.
With that in mind, let’s go over Jira requirements management.
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Using Jira for Requirements Management
If you want to leverage an Atlassian product for requirement management, then Jira is your best bet. While it is primarily built for project tracking, out of the box, you can use its default features or combine it with apps in the Atlassian Marketplace to manage requirements.
We’ll walk you through how to do it. But before we get to that, let’s first see what makes Jira so great for requirements management.
Why should you use Jira for requirements management?
Here are some of the common reasons people pick Jira for requirements management:
- Jira is highly customizable
Jira is extremely customizable and you can seamlessly repurpose it for requirements management. You can create requirements as custom issue types and even go as far as creating custom fields for the different issue types.
This ensures everyone involved knows which issues are classified under requirements to avoid confusing them with tasks, bugs, or other stories.
- Jira is extensible
Speaking of repurposing Jira to suit requirements tracking, you can install requirements management apps from the Atlassian Marketplace if you aren’t satisfied with what Jira offers by default. There are over a hundred apps in this marketplace that can help you do this.
On top of that, if you’re happy with what Jira offers but want more, you don’t have to install a complete requirements tracking tool. You can complement it with an app. For instance, if you want to add Test Management, you can install X-ray for Jira.
- Jira consolidates work and requirements in one place
You can have your project and its requirements in one place. Teams and stakeholders can focus on completing projects while keeping one eye on the requirements at the same time. They won’t lose sight of what their work is meant to serve.
Now we know why you would want to use Jira requirements management. It’s time to get practical and see how to get it done.
How to use Jira for requirements management?
When introducing this section, we brushed through the different ways to use Jira for requirements management. We can broadly group the ways of managing requirements in Jira into two:
- Using Jira issues and integrating it with Confluence.
- Using Jira together with apps and integrations with other tools.
It’s important to note that you can also use Jira and Confluence independently to track your requirements. However, each has limitations, which we’ll cover in this guide. Fortunately, using them together covers up their limitations to give you a complete solution.
Having said that, let’s dive in to explore how we can use Jira for requirements management.
1: Using Jira issues and integrating it with Confluence
If you’re already using Jira to track your projects, you can extend your work with it to requirements management. Jira allows you to do this by specifying requirements as custom Jira issues.
After creating these issues, you can define them with a description, Labels, and Components. Then you can do everything else that you would do for a typical Jira issue, such as:
- Assigning ownership and who reports the issue.
- Setting the due status and due date.
- Setting the priority.
- Assign it to an epic, and so on.
After creating requirements, you can link them to projects to ensure your work is aligned with the needs of the project. Managing requirements as Jira is the most basic way to do it. Suppose you already have a Jira License; here’s where you can start.
How to create requirements as issues in Jira
By now, you know that Jira doesn’t have a requirement issue type by default. Because of this, some project managers choose to create requirements as stories. But if you’re managing other projects here, team members could easily confuse your requirements with typical stories serving the project they’re working on.
So, the first thing you’ll need to do here is create a custom issue type called Requirements. You can do this from the Settings > Issues > Issue types section.
After creating a new issue type, use the Custom Fields tab to create custom fields for this issue type. Make this a select list because you’ll add the requirement types as options of this select list.
After creating your custom issue type, here’s how you can configure it:
- Search for it under Custom fields and then select Contexts and default value.
- Here’s where you’ll add the types of requirements as options of the select list. For this example, we’ve opted for the standard requirement types: Business, Functional, and System. But you can name them however you want, depending on your organization.
Once done, you’ll have a new requirement with requirement types as the custom fields. It’s important to note that this isn’t the only way to create custom requirements in Jira. You can still do it when you’re creating an issue. Just hover over the issue type icon and select Manage issue types.
On the next page, you’ll see an Add issue type button on the bottom-left. You can click on this and do all the above.
Creating requirements as issues
With Requirements as a new issue type, you can begin requirement management by creating new issues with ‘Requirement.’ You’ll write a short description of the requirement, for example, ‘Improve documentation for [feature],’ and then add a detailed description containing this information:
- The objective of the requirement.
- Background information to provide context.
- Use cases, if applicable.
Next, you’ll define the acceptance criteria, i.e., the conditions to be met to complete it. Like any other issue in Jira, you’ll need to assign it to a person, link it to related issues (or Epics), and set its priority. Finally, you can finish by attaching relevant files or diagrams to add context to your requirements.
Drawbacks of managing requirements as Jira issues
Jira is great for you if you already use it and you know it well. You don’t have to pay for another tool to manage your requirements. But, it has intrinsic limitations make it unsuitable for managing requirements independently.
These include:
- The system can become cluttered if you’re building a big project with tons of issues and requirements. There will be many issues for teams to follow. This goes against the main purpose of requirements tracking, as a product’s needs can easily get lost in project issues, like in the requirements management example below.
- Manually updating one requirement after another takes up much time that could otherwise be spent doing more productive work.
- You’ll need to create an external document or spreadsheet to share requirements with stakeholders.
- It has quite a steep learning curve if you’re new.
Perhaps its biggest limitation when it comes to requirements management is that it lacks a repository for storing and organizing requirements documentation. It doesn’t have a dedicated space for storing detailed descriptions, specifications, and other supporting material.
This is where Сonfluence comes in.
Integrating with Confluence
Confluence is another useful requirements management tool in the Jira ecosystem. It provides the space needed to store and present much more detailed information compared to Jira’s custom fields.In addition, it has a Product Requirements Template, which you can use to pre-format a page.
With this template, you’ll find useful fields for defining:
- Who’s part of the team working on the requirement? – owner, designer, tech lead, and tech writers.
- Objectives.
- Success metrics.
- Assumptions, milestones, etc.
You’ll also have a dedicated section for specifying each requirement, its importance, and its priority. Moreover, you can pull Jira issues directly into this page by simply typing ‘/Jira’ and selecting the issues you want to attach.
How to use Jira and Confluence to track requirements
The first thing you’ll want to do here is to build the requirements structure in Jira like we’ve covered above. Create requirements as custom Jira issues, assign ownership, and set the due date, priority, etc.
Once done, you can write down the details of the requirements on Confluence pages. A best practice is to have a general summary of the requirements on a main page and then create subpages with details for specific requirements.
You can leverage the Product Requirements Template to link requirement details in Confluence to requirement issues in Jira. Once everything is in place, you can export these requirements as a PDF file and share them with stakeholders.
So, that’s how you can leverage Jira and Confluence by default to manage requirements. Now, let’s move on to how to do this using apps in the Atlassian Marketplace.
Using Jira together with apps and integrations with other tools
If you prefer to customize Jira further to suit your requirements tracking needs, you can install dedicated requirement management apps from the Atlassian Marketplace. These include:
- Requirements Yogi
- easeRequirements – Requirements Management for Jira (R4J)
- RMsis – Requirements Management for Jira
These apps add requirements-specific features to Jira or Confluence to make managing requirements on these platforms easier. Taking R4J as an example, here are the features it adds to Jira:
- A folder system for organizing requirements. You can establish a hierarchy for your requirements and simplify how users visualize relationships between your requirements.
- You can integrate this folder hierarchy into your project tree to give context to your requirements.
- Requirement tracing – you can identify, analyze, and control your requirement’s dependencies. You can also link them to other issue types.
If we compare, tracing requirements you create using apps is easier, from start to finish. In addition, you can customize the requirements management process to suit the specific needs of a project or your organization.
However, you’ll need to take some time to learn how the app works and utilize it efficiently. Apps are also an added expense for your organization, and you should be willing to part ways with some funds to use them.
Having the right tool is only the first step. You’ll also need to get a handle on requirements management best practices to manage your requirements successfully.
Jira Requirements Management: Best Practices
Apart from having the best tool for requirements management, here are a few best practices you should consider.
1: Involve stakeholders early
Stakeholders such as customers, users, team members, and even executives will shape the course of your project, so it is best to involve them as early as you can. And by this we mean, when gathering your requirements.
Engaging stakeholders early will help you refine your requirements. They can provide feedback that will inform you on which requirements you can prioritize and which ones can take the back burner. It is also a great way to get them invested in your project from the outset.
2: Put a requirement changes approval strategy in place
Requirements change from time to time as you execute a project. Let’s say you want to include a search by keyword, category, and brand features in your grocery mobile app. But after market research, you find that customers prefer to search by isle number.
You’ll need to have a system in place to accommodate new changes in light of new information. A simple way to do it is to approve a change if it has a significant impact on the product. For example, this will greatly impact customer experience so, you should add a search by isle number feature to your app.
3: Version control your requirement docs
Your requirement docs should be version-controlled with everyone involved having access to the latest version. Remember that changes have the tendency to occur, and when you approve these changes, update the documents as well. If you’re using Confluence, you’ll have to export the updated Confluence page as a PDF and share it with stakeholders to ensure they’re up-to-date.
4: Prioritize requirements
Ask yourself: Which requirements have the most value for your project or product? Do your stakeholders agree? Then set priorities depending on the value of each requirement. Prioritize requirements that:
- Have a direct significant impact on the goals of the project and user experience.
- Have a lot of dependencies in the project.
- Help to mitigate risks or issues.
- Have a great cost-benefit ratio.
In doing so, you can allocate resources well (remember your team members are resources too) and set realistic expectations.
5: Ensure the traceability of your requirements
Link each requirement to its source – business goals, projects, test cases, etc. Fortunately, you can do this easily in Jira by liking requirement issues to stories or epics. This ensures that all requirements are accounted for and gives them more context.
Summary and Key Takeaways
Requirements management is crucial to the success of any project. Jira is a great tool for managing requirements due to its issue-tracking capabilities. Where it falls short in providing storage for detailed requirement descriptions, Confluence can step in. These two tools perfectly complement each other to help you manage requirements and projects in a single platform.
But if you want to customize Jira and Confluence further to suit your requirement management needs you can install apps from the Atlassian Marketplace. Ultimately, your success with requirements management depends on how well you put these tools to use with the best practices we’ve discussed in this guide.
