The Art of Using Checklists In Jira: Best Practices and Examples

You probably have your favorite recipe you like to treat yourself to every once in a while. Would it still be your go-to dish if you were to miss a couple of ingredients while cooking? 

A good checklist in Jira can ensure that you and your team are following the recipe to a tee every time.

Best Practices of Using Checklists in Jira

Many users get blindsided by the deceptively simple nature of a ToDo list. These tips and best practices can help you transform a checklist into a tool that adds clarity to business processes, leverages new forms of automation, and helps to break down tasks more effectively, thus unloading your mind.

Write a Checklist With the Correct Persona in Mind

Sure, some of the tips below come from a more generalized approach to making checklists, but they are still a valid addition to managing checklists in Jira specifically.

If writing a checklist for yourself: 

• Checklists and the GTD (Getting Things Done) method are a match made in heaven. Putting all of your ideas and ToDo’s in a written form can help you clarify and prioritize tasks that can then be translated into clear and actionable checklist items.
• Speaking of actionable items, make sure that the tasks from your checklist are not too big (make sure they don’t require further decomposition), and not too small. If writing a checklist item takes longer than getting that part of the job done - just do it.
• Lastly, you need to account for things changing. Review your checklists regularly to make sure they fit into updated processes or account for new data. 

If writing a checklist for somebody else: 

• People intuitively lean towards completing the tasks in the order they are presented to them. Therefore the first thing to consider when designing a checklist for someone else is the order of your checklist items.
• We’d also suggest ensuring that the weight and complexity of your checklist items are relatively similar to one another and that there are not too many of them. Having a checklist that holds more than ten items is intimidating and discouraging. Moreover, this volume indicates that the story itself can be broken into several smaller parts.
• Over-communication is your friend. Don’t hesitate to add information about something you believe is self-explanatory as not everyone comes from the same background. Add as many details as needed like, link to docs or internal policies, or even describe the context in your own words.

A Good Checklist Is More Than a List of Items

A good checklist is more than a list of items one crosses off to make sure that a feature meets its Acceptance Criteria. The functionality of Smart Checklist allows users to format their checklists, add assignees, share links and knowledge, and set up deadlines making a checklist item into a subtask of its own with the added benefit of keeping everything conveniently under one parent issue. 

• Checklists will work better than a subtask when you want to break down work into smaller parts while keeping your Jira instance much cleaner and easier to navigate.
• Checklists are great for adding clarity to an issue such as context description, links to relevant materials and templates, etc. 
• One of the primary use cases our engineers have is keeping the Definition of Done inside a ticket so that internal standards are enforced.
• Another great example of using a checklist would be a QA issue where a checklist can describe the test plan.
• Checklists are a great fit when the main feature has a list of requirements as in the screenshot below.
• Writing  an implementation plan in case you are an engineer

Handy Tips and Best Practices for Using Checklists in Jira

1. Customize the checklist to fit the way you work. Smart Checklist, for instance, has customizable statuses and you can go beyond keeping them to “to do," "in progress," or “done." Having statuses like “in review” or “in QA” helps the team stay on the same page as to the overall progress on a given issue.
2. Use checklist templates. Every company deals with recurring processes. Let’s take onboarding as our example: you need every newbie to finish certain predefined steps like logging into their corporate accounts, reading through the company’s or product’s wiki, etc. Our Jira Checklist allows you to make checklist templates for these kinds of recurring tasks.
   Engineers, Finance, Marketing, and HR teams are among the heaviest users of checklists at Railsware, and here are several examples of repetitive tasks they automate with a checklist:
   1. Definition of Done
   2. Onboarding
   3. Procurement
   4. Content publishing
3. Use automation rules to your advantage. Automatically adding a checklist to an issue of a certain type to serve as a template is nice, but there’s more. Smart Checklist is integrated with Script Runner, JMWE, and Automation for Jira. What this means is that users can set up their automation in a way where a checklist is added based on the content of an issue and their workflow setup.
4. Commit to the process: You will not be able to follow your plan when you can’t trust your own data. Unrealistic or outdated deadlines, for instance, are indicators that the process you’ve established isn’t working. The same can be said about checklist items that remain unchecked when the issue is moved to “done." Feel free to apply the Broken Windows theory to understand the impact of seemingly small cases like the ones mentioned above: if people start discarding certain checklist items, they will inevitably discard entire checklists sooner rather than later.

How We Use Checklists at Railsware (Checklist Use Case Examples)

We’ve touched on the subject of real-life checklist use cases in the best practices section of the article, but how about expanding the examples a bit? 

Definition of Done

The best way to make your Definition of Done easily accessible for everyone involved is to simply put it inside your Jira. Once there, it’s all that much easier to keep things updated and organized across all issues.

Checklists work exceptionally well in this case because Jira doesn’t have a dedicated feature for tracking the Definition of Done and having every element of it as a separate subtask leads to a mess on the board. 

Acceptance Criteria

When the dev team is building a feature they have certain criteria they need to meet, these criteria are used to ensure the team knows what they are doing and why before the development begins.

Some teams tend to put their Acceptance Criteria into the description field of a ticket. However, we’ve found that using a checklist is a bit more user-friendly as it’s much more visible when it is not squeezed together with the rest of the ticket description. 

Onboarding

An onboarding ticket is an excellent example of using checklists to repetitively communicate value. Think about it - there are always certain steps a new employee needs to make in a particular order in order to start working. Moreover, there’s a lot of information you must share like security policies, corporate values, and vision, or tutorials on using software. 

Smart Checklist allows you to set this once and every new onboarding ticket will be generated with a checklist inside of it. 

Procurement

Procurement is a complex process that involves a plethora of steps. A simple mistake at any stage from drafting a contract to a vendor to confirming the shipping address for new hardware can cost a lot of money.

Having a checklist that sets the entire process in stone is an excellent way of securing the team from accidental data input errors or missing something that’s quintessential to the process by accident. 

QA

Writing test case descriptions is a monotonous, repetitive task. But think about it this way – the better a job you do at this stage, the more time (and budget) you’ll save in the long run. Using a checklist tool can save you at least a bit of trouble as you can create the steps necessary to run the test case once, and they’ll automatically be there once you open an issue of a certain type.

Migrating Checklists From Trello

Managing several teams that are working together on a project is no simple feat. The fact that they are using different tools to track, plan, and coordinate their work adds even more salt to injury. Luckily, there are ways you can synchronize like, for instance, the Trello to Jira integration power-up. 

Our team has built a Smart Checklist Exporter power-up that helps strengthen this bond by allowing you to export checklists from Trello cards into Jira. This power-up makes following certain established workflows much simpler as you can take the ones that have proven their effectiveness from one project management tool and export them into another.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, there are plenty of benefits that come from introducing checklists to one’s Jira instance. Hopefully, these best practices will help break down tasks and unload your mind.