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What is Jira Tool in Agile?

What is Jira Tool in Agile?

November 22nd, 2018

What is Jira Tool in Agile?

Jira is a highly effective tool for agile project management. But what is agile project management? Similarly, to agile software development, agile project management (APM) is dividing the project into small sections known as iterations. These iterations are completed separately and the various stakeholders involved in the project review and analyze the iterations. Insights obtained from the analysis are used to determine the next step in the project.
The main benefit of agile projects is it allows the identification and response to issues promptly at a very early stage as the project is divided into iterations. Jira supports all types of agile project management methodology be it

Kanban, scrum, or your own version of agile.
The software includes everything from agile boards to reports. With the help of the software, you can plan, track, and manage the release of updates for your software or develop new software.

Jira Framework for Agile Project Management

Jira provides you with a single tool that can help you manage your agile project. It helps you deliver high-quality software, faster. Jira offers four types of frameworks for agile project management – Scrum, Kanban, Mixed methodology, and Agile at scale. We will elaborate one at a time.

Agile Tools for Scrum

Scrum is a methodology in agile where software products are developed in iterations of fixed-length. The structure of scrum comprises four components – sprint planning, sprints, stand-ups, and retrospectives. Jira includes a wide range of agile tools that allows the team to perform efficiently.

Sprint Planning

Sprint planning is determining the work to be completed in the future and the amount of work to be completed from the backlog. Jira software provides special emphasis on backlogs during the sprint meeting allowing you to estimate stories, adjust sprint scope, check velocity, and re-prioritize issues as they happen. Jira integrates several tools that help facilitate sprint planning such as version management, easy backlog grooming, scrum boards, story points, and sprint planning. Additionally, the software also helps you track and manage your sprints with features such as sprint permissions, custom issue types, workflows, and release hubs.

Stand Ups or Daily Scrums

Stand-ups are mini-meetings where the product development team gathers to discuss the tasks that have been accomplished and the work that will be done next. They also discuss the requirements or help needed in the project. Jira facilitates all these elements of stand-ups with advanced and intuitive tools such as JQL and filters and custom dashboards.

Retrospectives

Jira has a wide range of reports that provide better retrospect. The Burndown and Velocity reports provide a deep insight into the agile process. With the help of these empirical, data-driven reports, better introspects can be made to improve the sprints in the agile project. Jira includes reports such as Burndown charts, Sprint reports, Velocity charts, Cumulative flow diagram, Epic reports, Control charts, Epic burndowns, Release burndowns, and Version reports.

Jira Tools for Kanban

The methodology of Kanban is based on the continuous release of software. Tasks are tracked using the Kanban boards and the status of the work is displayed in lanes and columns. Similarly, to Scrum, Kanban also has four essential components – continuous releases, list of work, work in progress limits, and columns or lanes. The primary benefit of Kanban is that it allows the agile team to start the work right away without any overhead. With the Jira tool, you can customize workflows, projects, and issue types. Some of the features you can configure in Jira are Kanban boards, Story cards, flexible workflows, WIP limit configuration, and Swimlanes and columns. There are two types of reports in Kanban for agile projects – Cumulative flow diagram and Control charts.

Mixed methodology

A mixed methodology is a combination of elements of Scrum and Kanban. The features of Jira allows the agile teams to mix these without any constraint. Below are the agile tools in Jira and the methodology the support:

AGILE TOOLS SCRUM KANBAN SCRUMBAN KANPLAN
Agile boards ü ü ü ü
Project and issue tracking ü ü ü ü
Custom workflows ü ü ü ü
Backlog management ü ü ü
Agile reports ü ü ü ü

Agile at scale

There is always a race to increase the productivity of software at the same time reducing waste. Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and Large-scale Scrum (LeSS) sit on top of agile frameworks Scrum and Kanban, which addresses scaling agile. They focus on scaling guidelines without losing the integrity of Scrum principles.

Related Questions

What is the difference between Scrum and agile?
Scrum is one of the methodologies of agile project management. The two main methodologies of agile are Scrum and Kanban.

Is Kanban Lean or Agile?
The focus of Kanban lean is to minimize waste including work in progress, which is also considered as waste. It aims at making the production and delivery of products as efficient as possible. Kanban and Lean Software Development are implementations of Lean.