From ticket to PR: a disciplined workflow
No more slides — today we build. We run a real development lifecycle end to end, and it starts where work really starts: a ticket. Meet Jira, and meet our product, Pre-Legal.
Welcome to week two, day four — another purple, big-ideas day. Yesterday we met the big three ways to give Claude Code superpowers: MCP, skills and plugins. That was a lot to take in, and it can feel overwhelming to have so much choice. So today changes gear completely. No more slides. We build. Over today and tomorrow we will run a real, disciplined development workflow — the same one professional teams use — and take a feature all the way from an idea to shipped code.
We are going to read work from Jira, hand it to Claude Code (guided by a plugin, powered by MCP servers and a skill), and have it deliver finished, reviewed code as a GitHub pull request — end to end, from one short command.
01One more look at the big three
Before we put them to work, a quick recap — because you will use all three today. Each is just a different way to hand Claude Code more ability, and each has a sweet spot.
| Building block | What it is | Great because… | Watch out for… |
|---|---|---|---|
| MCP | A standard (invented by Anthropic) for plugging other people's tools into Claude Code. | The ecosystem is enormous — a tool exists for almost everything. | Can eat context, and servers can be fiddly (auth that drops, occasional flakiness). |
| Skills | Lightweight Markdown (plus optional scripts) that adds expertise, revealed to the model only when needed. | Simple, very context-friendly, and trivially easy to share with your team via Git. | Less powerful than MCP for things like authentication; still a young idea. |
| Plugins | A package of MCP servers + skills + commands + agents, installable in one go. | Best of both worlds; the tidiest way to distribute a setup. | Currently a Claude Code idea; too many at once can degrade performance. |
Start with plugins — browse the marketplace and grab one that fits. Drop down to a raw MCP server when you need a very specific, powerful integration (as we will for Jira and GitHub). Write a skill when you have your own repeatable expertise you want the model — and your teammates — to use.
It is tempting to install ten plugins and every MCP server you can find. Resist it. Give an LLM too many options and performance degrades — it can struggle to pick the right tool, and your context fills up. A tight, deliberate toolkit beats a giant one every time.
02Today is about doing — and it is choose-your-own-adventure
Here is the beautiful thing about learning this way. You can follow along and build almost exactly what the instructor builds, or take the same workflow in a completely different direction with your own idea, or sit somewhere in the middle. This is the art of the possible, not one prescriptive recipe.
Follow along
Build the same product, step for step. Safest if this is all new.
Same workflow, your idea
Use the exact process to build something you care about.
Start together, branch off
Begin with the shared idea, then take it somewhere of your own.
Whatever you pick, the process is the point. Master it once and it works for any feature, any product, any team.
03Where real software starts: a ticket
Where do projects usually begin? You might say a business requirements document, or a meeting with a sponsor. True — but that is a little too far upstream for us. We are going to start where work becomes concrete and assignable: the moment it turns into a Jira ticket.
Jira (from Atlassian) is close to ubiquitous — the majority of software teams use it to track work as “issues” (now called work items). If you prefer something lighter, GitHub Issues works just as well and we will wire that up too. Either way, the shape of the workflow is the same, and it looks like this:
04Get your own free Jira
We may as well have our own Jira to experiment in. It is free for up to 10 users with no credit card, which is plenty for our purposes. This part is optional — if you would rather keep things simple, skip straight to GitHub Issues later — but Jira is so common that it is worth seeing.
Go to the Jira sign-up page2 min
Visit atlassian.com/software/jira and press Get it free (free for up to 10 users, no card needed). The link is in the course resources.
Sign in with Google1 min
Use Google Auth with your email, add your full name, and let Atlassian spin up your site — your personal Atlassian home.
Land on the Spaces screen1 min
You should arrive at a screen showing Spaces. If not, use the app-switcher icon (top-left grid) and choose Jira.
Atlassian renamed things. A Space is the new name for what used to be a Jira project. Confusingly there is also a separate “Projects” area for project management — ignore that one. If you have known Jira for years, this is all familiar; if it is new, just follow the names we use here.
05Create your Space — meet “Pre-Legal”
Press Create Space and pick a typical software development space using Kanban — the same board style we have seen before. Now name it. This is where we choose our product, and it is a good one:
A tool that drafts legal documents for a user or company — an NDA, a client contract, an engagement letter — from a repository of templates. It is called Pre-Legal because it does not replace a lawyer; it does the pre-work so an attorney or paralegal is set up perfectly. It is juicy, it clearly benefits from gen-AI, and it could plausibly be monetised.
Name and describe the Space1 min
Call it Pre-Legal. That is the name of our product.
Choose management & access1 min
Pick Team-managed (we are not coordinating across many spaces) and leave access Open — only you have the site anyway.
Set the key30 sec
The key is the prefix stamped on every item. Keep it simple: PL for Pre-Legal.
Skip inviting a team for now30 sec
In a real company a whole team shares one board. For us, choose I'll do this later and press Done. Your Pre-Legal Kanban board is live.
06Create your first work item (PL-1)
Now the fun part — a Jira issue, or as it is called now, a work item. Press Create, and under “what needs to be done” put something deliberately simple to start:
“We need a simple website that describes the Pre-Legal company.”
That creates an item called PL-1. Click it and you will see it is a Task — the lowest level of granularity, the everyday unit of work. That is all it takes: we now have a real ticket, in a real tool, waiting to be picked up. In the next page we teach Claude Code to read it.
✓ Key takeaways
- Today is hands-on: we run the full development lifecycle, using MCP + a plugin + a skill together.
- The big three each have a sweet spot — start with plugins, drop to MCP for specific power, write skills for shareable expertise.
- Real work starts as a ticket; we use Jira (or GitHub Issues) as the entry point.
- Jira is free for small teams. A Space is the new name for a project; items live on a Kanban board with a key like
PL. - Our product is Pre-Legal, and our first ticket is PL-1: a simple company website.