One key element of Scrum & Agile is to acknowledge the complexity of our work and especially of the communication. The initial idea of the Daily for example is that you meet each day at the same time, in the same place, with the same people, to talk about the same things – to reduce the complexity of communication and organisation.
But why stop at the daily? I believe that there are plenty things in our daily work that we can simplify to make our lives easier. In one team I started with the Jira tickets. We use them everyday and they are the base of our work and the product, so the expectation was that the impact can be seen immediately. To simplify them, we introduced templates – a simple text template that is filled out when we create a ticket. We created four templates for our four most used ticket types: Bug, Story, Spike & Epic.
The templates contain all types of information that we need have to work on each ticket type. For example the steps to reproduce a bug, the acceptance criteria for a user story & the question that needs to be solved with a spike. With the templates the tickets were easier to create, because you basically follow a checklist. It also helps to ensure the Definition of Ready. If you decided to add to the DoR that the steps of reproducing a bug must be known & they are part of the template you don’t always have to remember it, because the template constantly reminds you – It “forces” you to add all the information that the team needs. If you are adventurous, you can even add the usage of the template to the DoR. On the other end the tickets are easier to read: Every ticket looks the same & everyone knows which information can be found at what place in the ticket.
Here you can find some example for User Stories:
As a... I want to... so I can...
##Covered Usecase
Lorem Ipsum...
##Acceptance Criteria
1.
2.
3.
##Out of Scope
Lorem Ipsum...
##Additional Information
Lorem Ipsum...
##Technical Hints
Lorem Ipsum...