microcontroller bring-up
I think you're on the right track although I'd check for shorts between power and gnd before powering it up.   If there's an external crystal that should be enabled by default you can scope it and see if it's oscillating.

Your first test will be seeing if you can even talk to it over jtag, in other words if the tool can even see the part.   

If that works you can move on to trying to blink an led or toggle an I/O pin to see if it's working.