Here is a very brief case study of how complex work is divided into the right set of Jira issues at Oasis Digital, Expium’s sister company. Typically an experienced developer or manager will choose and approach to this challenge for a particular project; the approach year has worked reasonably well for our teams..

Important to the success of Oasis Digital Projects is that we break down a large items into small items which can be effectively addressed by the development team and presented as tangible progress to the customers. These are the Issues, which are to be separately numbered and titled.

DON’T: From a problem-solving approach, we might divide the work to be done by layers (ie GUI–> logic–> queries–> tables). This results in many features being developed in parallel, but not actually completed until near the end of the project.  Although the final software is layered, this layered approach to dividing items does not provide results that our customers can see to justify continued investment in the Project.

DO: We strive to divide the work into chunks of functionality, incorporating multiple layers, so that goals are achieved that can be tested and demonstrated, and there are regular “completions” throughout the process.

Occasionally a system requires interaction with another system, and a “dummy” parallel system can be created for testing, so that testing this completed issue is within our purview before the end of the project.  this is complex and perhaps beyond the scope of a simple write-up.

Each issue, when possible, should be completable by one developer or a couple of developers, and be tested independently of the other issues.

If an issue cannot be completed within a day or two, consider how it might be further divided, without losing the ability for each division to stand alone (in other words, testing or demonstrating one segment does not require another to be completed). You are encouraged to use each project as an opportunity to converge with management and other developers to correctly and creatively divide issues.