Background
Cydar Medical develops medical imaging software that delivers real time and automated 3D overlays to operating rooms.
Behind the scenes, Jira Cloud is used to manage Cydar’s software development and internal research processes.
Cydar’s use of Jira evolved organically and we were approached to review and align Cydar’s needs with best practice. As well as rationalising the project setup in Jira, Cydar was keen to maximise use of Jira’s features and begin using boards for managing work and the release hub for tracking versions.
Challenge
New Verve was tasked to streamline and consolidate Cydar’s software development process in Jira Software.
We faced numerous challenges:
- consolidating multiple Jira projects that had shared software components and release cycles;
- configuring and introducing Kanban boards for the first time;
- redesigning existing workflows to be more flexible and generic enough to use in different types of projects (e.g. research v software development);
- migrating existing tickets to new issue types and associated configuration.
The Solution
As part of the initial engagement process, we performed a Jira health check to highlight configuration issues and to provide recommendations aligned with industry best practices. A health check report was delivered and many of our recommendations were implemented. These included a revamp of permission schemes, a full audit of Jira users, and the dropping of labels in favour of components.
We next held a discovery workshop in Cydar’s office, where the new business processes were agreed. We swiftly began mapping these to Jira and gradually refined the solution in close collaboration with Cydar.
The new solution incorporated many elements:
- separation of software with distinct release cycles and roadmaps into independent Jira projects;
- multiple custom fields and screens for analysing the risk of new and existing features;
- a simplified workflow for epics and tasks;
- a workflow for bugs and improvements, with various conditions, validators, and post functions that incorporated Cydar’s business rules;
- multiple cross-project Kanban boards to manage and track work at different stages in the SDLC.
Categories: Agile
Technologies: Jira Software
3 Jira projects
were successfully migrated to the new setup.
2 bespoke workflows
were designed and implemented to manage different types of work.
4 Kanban boards
were introduced to manage different stages of the software development lifecycle.
"Our existing Jira Workflow didn't represent how we developed our software at Cydar Medical. We used New Verve to help us identify how Jira could be configured to better relate to our development workflow, remove the quirks of our old configuration while avoiding impacting other projects in Jira which needed to remain untouched. New Verve were very helpful in identifying parts of our new Jira Configuration which would be unworkable and steering us around the pitfalls which we would have stumbled into without using New Verve advising us, and were quick to respond to requests for changes as we identified new requirements. Towards the end of the project, New Verve worked closely with us to find the least disruptive time to make the new configuration live. We look forward to working with New Verve again in the future."
- Trevor Hook, Manager of Quality Assurance