I know it's not a Spring specific question, but here goes:

As good as Jira can be for tracking bug and issue status and associating them with a release, very few developers seem to use it to answer the question "What are you working on now? and how will you know when you're done?". (WAYWON? HWYKWYD?)

There are multiple new features, enhancements, etc. for 1.2 RC1 (for example, Declarative rules-based validator). This might take a while to do, need to be broken down, have sub-tasks assigned to different people. In particular, if you were trying to time-box iterations leading to the release, how would you know if this part of that Jira issue was likely to be done in such-and-such a time period?

Really it's a question about how the Spring team organizes work behind Jira. I admit that I have an agenda. My team (I'm basically a tracker/release coordinator) keeps telling me that they just want to put stuff in Jira, I keep asking them WAYMON? HWYKWYD? and they can't tell me.... except that they are working on the stuff for the next release from the Road Map and they will be done when it's released.

Personally I am a big list on the wall kind of guy (features and tasks to be done this month). Maybe the list starts in a wiki so detail can be linked. I plan a chunk of work, break it down, check things off for two weeks then start a new list. Repeat 'til ready to release.

I'm stumbling over the role of Jira in the process and how to integrate it. Any insight appreciated.