Live reports that provide an overview are powerful. But they are not available with Jira out of the box.
APTIS in Germany wanted an overview tool that worked well with smaller projects, not only larger ones. So they decided to build their own app to help manage small to medium-sized Jira projects.
Then seeing how well it worked they decided to sell it to other Jira users on the Atlassian Marketplace. It turned out many others had similar problems and liked the solution they created.
Here is APTIS’ story of how what became the Jira app Epic Sum Up has helped them work smarter in Jira.
Problem Solving
APTIS has developers working with story points, and customers and project managers working with time. Yet scrum boards are limited to one dimension – story points or time – which was endlessly frustrating.
They wanted to see progress in terms of both story points and time along with an overview. In particular, how to create projects with tasks from different projects and not just work with issues (example moving around subtasks).
Requirements:
- More than one level of hierarchy
- Flexible stacking of hierarchies
- Create new epics inside issues
- Move around subtasks
- Choose assignees
Goals:
- Agile development, internal projects, customers projects
- Easy to setup
- Accounting integrated
- Get an overview of what’s inside issues
Solution Using Epic Sum Up
Jira App: Scheduler
- Containers to create a new structure
- Issuetypes set to use enhanced container functionality
- Summary Panel with progress bars for live reporting
I have handled 70 projects at once. The overview is key.
CEO, APTIS
Create Custom Functionality
1. Summary Panel
With summary panels APTIS gets an easy to understand overview of issues in a container. The progress bars are key to this easy of use and quick overview.
In one view see any number based value. These are the ones APTIS uses:
- Time spent
- Estimated time
- Remaining time
- Time budget
- Story points
- Status category
- Number of attachments
- Number of comments
2. Easy editing
Fast and easy editing of your project scope (all issues related to your project).
Features include inline editing, sorting filtering, and bulk editing.
3. Container functionality to any issuetype
The key to make Jira flexible with small projects. We do not use Jira projects as projects, rather we use issues as projects.
This allows us to use workflows as project lifecycles which includes post-function validators and conditions. Adding container functionality to any issue type increases flexibility to stack your issues in structures of any height.
Related Webinar
Watch this past webinar where Andreas Haaken, CEO and founder of APTIS, discusses how he does lightweight project management in Jira with the help of Epic Sum Up.
