How to Manage Requirements in Jira Cloud

Spreadsheet Issue Field Editor is an alternative to the list view in Jira Work Management that provides you with extensive capabilities for inline editing of Jira Cloud issues and collaborating on them with your team. Take advantage of spreadsheet issue editing for Jira issues and greatly speed up your project management activities.

A new project is always an adventure, a challenge that you need to complete. Work on a new project starts from the elicitation of requirements. The way you do it may differ depending on the project. As the result, you get a list of requirements that you may keep in some document, spreadsheet, or whatever you use.

In this post, we will show you how to manage requirements in Jira Cloud like in your Excel spreadsheet and update them with ease. So let’s start!

Creating a new issue type

First of all, you need to create a new issue type and name it as a requirement. This way we will separate it from other issue types that exist within your project and this issue type will be used for tracking requirements only, as well as all attributes you need.

After this, let’s add the fields for tracking attributes of requirements. In our case, we track the following:

• Priority — priority of the requirement according to the MoSCoW model. If needed you can use the default Priority field for this.
• Type — type of requirement (business, functional, and non-functional).
• Owner — a person or stakeholder who reported this requirement. Here you can use a single or multiple user picker for situations when multiple stakeholders report the same requirement. Here it depends on your preferences.
• Risk level — level of risk pertaining to the implementation of this requirement within the project.
• SMART verified — flag that the requirement passes the SMART validation. It indicates that the requirement corresponds to all criteria, if not it should be revised.
• Change needed? — flag that the requirement introduces some changes that may affect the existing solution.
• Components — set of components which this requirement impacts.

The requirement description is saved in the summary, if needed, additional notes about it can be tracked in the corresponding field. As the result, a typical requirement looks like this:

But requirements tend to constantly change, so it becomes a real problem to make minor updates in requirements in Jira Cloud. Going through the list of requirements in the issue navigator can become a problem too.

Inline editing of requirements in a spreadsheet-like way

If you are still missing your Excel spreadsheet with the list of requirements, no worry, we can move it to Jira Cloud as is 🙂 You just need to install the Spreadsheet Issue Field Editor, and that’s it.

You can add the necessary fields and edit them one by one, like in an Excel spreadsheet. This way, you can quickly go with your team through the list of requirements and specify the correct attributes at once.

In addition, you can also edit your requirements in bulk by specifying the necessary values for your requirements. This can significantly accelerate your process at the initial stage of requirement review and evaluation.

As usual, you may need to map requirements to actual tasks or user stories that you create to ensure that no requirements will be missed within the project scope. This can be easily done with Spreadsheet Issue Field Editor.

Just click Create linked issue, select the link type and the issue you want to link. All the linked issues with their attribution types can be easily viewed in the spreadsheet.

This was a simple, but very effective way to quickly edit and manage requirement attributes in Jira without going through each requirement one by one. Have any questions about Spreadsheet Issue Field Editor, please open a ticket with us.