Easy Agile's getting onboard the Cloud Fortified train

Jira is the #1 software development tool used by agile teams. It’s designed to help development teams plan, track, and release awesome products. With Jira Software, teams can work within multiple different frameworks, including Kanban and Scrum, while gaining access to agile reporting, integrations, and automations.

It’s completely versatile, so teams can work in whatever way best suits them. Plus, Jira Software is designed to help teams continuously improve their performance. This agile project management and agile software development tool is available in three different packages:

• Jira Core: The basic Jira platform
• Jira Software: Jira Core plus additional Agile functions
• Jira Service Desk: Service experience delivery

In this post, we’ll focus on all of the features available for teams using Jira Software. We’ll cover what’s included and how your team can make the most of Jira Software features and add ons.

Jira Software Scrum boards

Jira Software is designed to work within various agile frameworks. The Scrum process helps devops teams bring iterative and incremental value to stakeholders and customers.

One Scrum is usually made up of a two-week sprint that aims to complete a specific set of backlog items from the product backlog. Product owners plan sprints, and a Scrum Master guides the development team through the various stages of the Scrum.

The team works to complete the most important work while meeting for daily standups to review their progress and any potential roadblocks. The daily standup allows teams to learn on the go and use an iterative and customizable approach.

Jira Scrum boards unite teams around a single goal while promoting iterative, incremental delivery. The tool provides data-driven Scrum insights so that product owners and team members can keep track of sprint goals and improve retrospectives. Jira’s customization helps teams deliver consistent value to stakeholders quickly and effectively based on ever-evolving customer feedback.

With Jira Scrum boards, you can:

• Build a single source of truth for all of the work that needs to be completed
• View your progress visually during the development cycle
• Provide all team members with a clear view of what’s on their plate
• Quickly identify any blockers or potential blockers
• Organize work around the sprint time frame
• Avoid over-committing on work at any given time
• Don’t lose track of key dates or milestones.
• Utilize key metrics, including burndown charts and velocity reports

Jira Software Kanban boards

Image credit: Atlassian

Kanbans provide workflow transparency for development teams by establishing a visual representation of what needs to be done, what’s in progress, and what’s been completed. They also help teams understand their capacity so they can focus on one key task at a time. Work to be completed moves from one column to the next — from To Do to In Progress to Done.

Jira Kanban boards provide a framework for teams to continuously and efficiently deliver work. They are simple to use, visually engaging, and completely customizable to the specific needs of the team. Jira Kanban board columns can be customized based on other requirements, such as In Review or Waiting for Client Feedback.

With Jira Kanban boards, you can:

• Clearly visualize workflows
• Depict work at distinct stages
• Build a single source of truth for all of the work that needs to be completed
• View an at-a-glance summary of where work stands
• Capture relevant information for Jira issues, tasks, stories, or bug tracking
• Limit the amount of work-in-progress
• Prevent bottlenecks and spot them before they delay work
• Configure workflows to be as simple or as complex as needed
• Customize boards based on the needs of the team
• Utilize real-time visual metrics

Jira Software roadmaps

Roadmaps help agile teams see the big picture surrounding the development of a product. They establish a flexible plan for what the team hopes to accomplish and provide a visual of how all of the pieces connect.

Even though the roadmap lays out a clear view of the road ahead, it’s not a set-in-stone plan of what’s to come. The agile methodology and nature of roadmaps mean they are constantly updated and fine-tuned based on new information that continually flows in from team members, stakeholders, and customers.

Jira roadmaps are available to teams and organizations through Jira Software Premium. They help teams track progress based on the big picture to predict capacity and avoid bottlenecks.

With Jira roadmaps, you can:

• Sketch the big picture
• Map and account for dependencies
• Track your progress
• Account for team bandwidth
• View capacity on a sprint-by-sprint basis
• Iterate and update as you learn more about a project, product, or customer needs
• Sync in real-time so that everyone is on the same page
• Create multiple roadmap versions to account for different scenarios
• Share your roadmaps with stakeholders

We designed the simplest roadmapping tool for Jira. Our Easy Agile Roadmaps For Jira help development teams create product roadmaps that are simple to use, flexible, and collaborative. It offers an intuitive one-click drag-and-drop functionality and a super-clean user experience. Watch a demo of our roadmaps in action to learn more.

Jira Software reporting

Image credit: Atlassian

No matter how you choose to use Jira, you’ll gain access to a range of critical insights. Clear metrics will help your team make data-driven decisions. Utilize agile reports and dashboards to better understand what you’re doing well and where you can improve your process.

Use Jira reporting to analyze sprint reports, burndown charts, release burndowns, velocity charts, cumulative flow diagrams, and more. Real-time data helps teams track progress in a meaningful way, including managing sprint progress and accounting for scope creep. Take clear data into your retrospectives and provide customizable dashboards to stakeholders and leadership.

With Jira reporting, you can:

• Make data-driven decisions
• Track your progress against both product and sprint goals
• Monitor progress so you can take action if work falls behind
• Use past data to create realistic estimates
• Spot overcommitment and excessive scope creep
• Catch bottlenecks
• Predict future performance
• Take clear metrics intro retrospectives
• Provide stakeholders with visual data using customizable dashboards

Jira Software integrations

Image credit: Atlassian

Jira offers integrations with the tools and apps your team is already using. You can seamlessly connect Jira Software to plugins like Bitbucket, Trello, Confluence, GitHub, Slack, and many more. There are thousands of integrations available.

You can also extend Jira Software with over 3000 apps available in the Atlassian Marketplace. The marketplace contains apps for dozens of categories, including code review, design tools, reports, time tracking, and workflows.

That’s where you’ll find the Easy Agile products we designed to offer teams a customer-centric approach to product development.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm is trusted by companies of all sizes, including Amazon, Twitter, Adobe, AT&T, Cisco, JP Morgan, and Rolex. Our team agility app helps you and your team deliver for your customers by prioritizing the work that will deliver the most value to your users. It helps you work better together with smooth sprint and version planning, simple story mapping, easy backlog refinement, and team retrospectives for continuous improvement.

Access a free trial for 30 days. If you have questions, contact our team to learn more about our suite of Jira products.

For more content written for Jira users just like you, follow the Easy Agile Blog and tune into the Easy Agile Podcast for an inside look at the most interesting and successful business, tech, and agile leaders.

Scrum isn't the only agile software development methodology out there. 😲 If you're not familiar with Kanban, we promise we’re not going rogue — Kanban is agile. And, Jira project management tools make organizing a Kanban team really simple.

Kanban originates from Lean principles and focuses on eliminating waste and evaluating processes throughout the entire project lifecycle rather than just at the end. The key fundamentals of Lean are purpose, process, and people. Sounds pretty agile, doesn't it?

Jira project management tools help you get off to a great start with Kanban. You can use the default Jira boards or go crazy with customizations. It’s up to you and your team.

If you're not sure whether Kanban or Scrum is right for your company, keep reading. We'll give you some information to help you decide. We'll also share some tips on how to use Jira project management tools to keep your work organized and your team productive.

Which is best: Scrum or Kanban?

Both. Or, neither. Scrum and Kanban are both effective methodologies for developing software. Which is best for your organization is a better way to ask the question. The answer depends on the kind of work or project types assigned to your team.

Scrum is generally recommended when:

• Your project is relatively stable, meaning you can go a few weeks without a major change in requirements, features, or general product direction.
• The majority of your team's work items are complex features or significant product updates rather than small tweaks, bug fixes, or reactionary work from external feedback.
• You can plan your work a few weeks in advance, generally without significant changes in scope or requirements.
• You have a cross-functional team, willing and able to tackle work as a team rather than individually.

If the following sounds more like your software development team, you should consider Kanban:

• Your work is dynamic with frequent changes in priority.
• You're normally working on small updates, bug fixes, or responding to customer demands.
• Your team resources are shared across multiple projects or products.
• Most of your team members work independently because you generally don't need to collaborate.

Finally, you should consider Waterfall 😲 if:

• Your work is predictable or repetitious (annual updates or regularly scheduled upgrades).
• You're 100% familiar with the work, the technology, and the desired outcome.
• There's little chance of scope or requirement changes.
• There is an absolute path from start to finish required by legal or regulatory compliance standards.

Look, we love agile as much as anyone. But we don't let our passion for Scrum and Kanban get in the way of creating the best possible work environment for our teams. The best software methodology and process is the one that best suits your team.

How to get started with a Kanban project in Jira

Atlassian created a great platform to help Jira users manage Kanban teams. Step 1 is choosing the Kanban template when you create your new project. Easy peasy. 🤓

Next, you'll want to set up your Kanban workflow. Jira creates a default workflow for you: Backlog, Selected for Development, In Progress, and Done. The default works great for a lot of teams, but if you want to customize it, click the dot menu in the upper right corner and click “Board Settings.”

The board settings let you go nuts customizing:

• Columns and quick filters
• Swimlanes and card colors
• Card and issue detail views
• Prioritization ranks
• Working days
• Integrating the board with a roadmap.

One of the goals of Kanban is to help isolate areas in your process in real-time that are slowing down the delivery of work. Keep this in mind as you think about each step in your process and decide which steps need a column in the workflow.

To keep from having 20 columns on your board, consider combining related steps or grouping sequential steps that typically happen very quickly.

Let’s talk about WIP limits

Now that you have built your Kanban board, it’s time to set WIP limits. (That's work-in-progress for the novices.) WIP limits restrict you from overloading a stage in the workflow with too much work.

Let's talk about the purpose of a WIP limit. WIP limits help your team stay focused on a single task at a time so they can complete it, deploy it, and move on to the next task.

A lot of items in progress tend to distract people. They work on one task for a little while, then switch to another task, finishing neither and deploying nothing. 😕 That's called context-switching, and it'll suck the life out of your productivity.

WIP limits also show you bottlenecks in your process. Depending on your workflow, you may see work stacking up in In Progress for a particular team member but nothing is moving to Done. You need to figure out why.

If your workflow is more specific, you may see a work overload for the database team while nothing is In Progress for your front-end developer.

WIP limits won’t solve these problems, but they do let you know when you have a problem so you can dig in and figure out a solution.

Tips for using card colors and swimlanes

Agile project management for a Kanban team is all about keeping the team productive without getting in their way, reporting on overall status, anticipating issues, and problem-solving. Card colors and swimlanes give project managers at-a-glance insight into key team metrics.

Card colors and swimlanes represent specific issue attributes or they can represent query results or assignees. We like to think of the card colors as more detailed issue-tracking data, while swimlanes give us a higher-level picture of the whole body of work.

Regardless of how you like to organize your work, consider the flexibility with assigning queries to your swimlanes or card colors. Following are some ideas to query by:

• Type of work: UX, design, front-end, database, etc.
• Label: Create team- or project-specific labels.
• Components: Divide your project into sections and assign each section a component.
• Effort and time-tracking: Anticipate throughput by at-a-glance efforts by work item.
• Business value or reporter: Get organized by stakeholder or business unit.
• Custom fields: View user segment or another custom field that is meaningful to your company.

Kanban and Jira boards can support various project management processes, from project plan to workflow management to stakeholder communications. You just have to explore what's available and get creative with your Jira customizations.

Get organized with Jira project management tools

Regardless of your agile methodology preference, effective project organization and oversight are almost impossible without some kind of project management software. But let's be honest — the last thing your team or organization needs is another tool.

Your software developers love using Jira software. 🤟 You can configure Jira workflows and customizations to meet even the pickiest project management needs with just a little effort. You'll save time and the hassle of integrating an external product or worse - manually pulling project data together for your reporting and stakeholder communications.

The Atlassian Marketplace is a great source to find add-ons for even more functionality to handle your task management and project team needs. Easy Agile created two apps specifically to help project managers: Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Easy Agile Programs.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm helps scrum and kanban teams plan and manage their work with the context that a user story map format provides. Team retrospective functionality helps your team focus on continuous improvement.

View team swimlanes, track cross-team dependencies, and keep your focus at the program level with Epic- and Feature-only views with our Programs app.

Whether you're supporting a Kanban or Scrum team, building roadmaps, version planning, and planning program increments in Jira just got easier!

The Atlassian Marketplace is filled with helpful Jira add-ons or plugins. These apps help teams successfully carry on projects and deliver on time. In this article, we’ll go over our selection of Jira gadgets for workflow management, reporting, and project administration.

We'll show you some of the best solutions to:

• Analyze data about Jira issues
• Automate Jira issue workflows
• Migrate projects and their configurations
• Build user story maps in Jira

But now seems like the perfect time to explain why we're such big fans of Jira Software and Jira add-ons. 🙌

Why Jira add-ons are trending right now

Jira is the leading software solution for collaborative teams — developers around the world rely on it to track their tasks and ship value to customers.

One of Jira's major value points is customization. Jira users can customize issue workflows and issue types, for instance, to meet your project requirements. After setting up your Jira process, developers adjust and adapt to the tool. Over time, the number of Jira projects and issues in your company will increase, so you need a system to keep up with the pace of your growth. 📈

Scaling growth brings some challenges. But it doesn’t have to be a big issue! 🙅 Jira add-ons build on Jira's strengths, allowing you to set it up to suit the needs of the team. They allow developers, other team members like Product Owners, and business stakeholders to get the most value out of one shared platform. To choose the best Jira add-ons for you, take a look at what your team most needs help with, pricing, and any available tutorials.

Let's dig into some of the trending Jira plugins.

1. Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira

Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira is one of our Jira add-ons and one of the top-selling apps on the Atlassian Marketplace

You may use Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira to create straightforward user story maps collaboratively. But why do you need user story maps?

Why user story maps are useful

User story maps facilitate agile teams during project inception. Those maps are a visual representation of customer journeys and the activities and tasks that customers execute in the product.

The visualization of the customer journey is the biggest benefit when moving from flat product backlogs into user story maps. Additionally, they can understand and prioritize the work they should do to deliver customer-valuable product releases.

There's more to Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira, though. The app allows you to:

• Create epics and user stories
• Update and refine user stories
• Break down epics into user stories
• Schedule user stories
• Register effort estimates in user stories
• Edit user story point estimates
• Order user stories by customer value inside the respective Scrum sprint or Kanban version swimlane with the drag-and-drop functionality
• Analyze sprint or version statistics to ensure that the planned work doesn't exceed the team's capacity
• Visualize what the team will deliver and when by arranging user stories into sprint or version swimlanes

2. Pivot Report

If you’re already using Jira, all or most of your project’s software development data is in Jira. That means you should rely on Jira to analyze that data. The Pivot Report Jira add-on is your go-to solution if you need to visualize or present data from Jira issues in the form of a pivot table. It's your way of seeing the big picture of your Jira issues. We'll explain this in detail below, but first, let’s review what pivot tables are.

What's a pivot table?

A pivot table is a data analysis artifact you can use to answer business questions such as the impact of advertising on sales or the relation between product returns and quality assurance procedures. You might know the term from Microsoft Excel. Pivot tables also come in handy for sending condensed and organized business information to stakeholders. They may use that information for decision-making or process improvement, to name a few use cases.

Pivot tables are easy to understand, as they help you visualize data. Since a pivot table stores data, you can use it to play around with those data. For instance, you can filter, sort, group, and perform calculations on data.

Pivot tables for Jira

Jira's default reports, advanced searching, and dashboards are nice enough, but you might also need help viewing overall progress information or totals. Pivot tables help with that.

Often, other reporting solutions require extra set-up to match your Jira settings and project customization. But with Pivot Report for Jira, the tweaks you need only take a couple of clicks.

So, if you need the big picture of your Jira project, you may use the Pivot Report Jira add-on. It can help evaluate your project's status point from these perspectives:

• Overall scope progress
• What Jira issues the team tackled — open and closed issues
• Who exactly resolved each issue
• The amount of work left to do
• Overdue issues and other flaws such as issues without assignee, overdue, or outdated

You can also use the Pivot Report add-on for:

• Time-tracking for team members
• Customized progress visualization by picking the indicators you need and ordering them as you wish
• Getting the big picture of your Jira issues, such as the relation between epics, tasks, and subtasks

3. JMWE (Jira Misc Workflow Extensions)

JMWE (Jira Misc Workflow Extensions) is perhaps the best Jira Cloud app to automate Jira issue workflows. It was born by the need of Jira administrators to customize workflows. As Jira's default capabilities don't include complex workflow templates, the answer was customization...and JMWE.

This Jira add-on extends Jira to help you design and implement complex workflows. And the more you can customize a workflow to meet your project configuration, the more automatized data input gets.

And do you know what's even better than workflow customization in JMWE? If you don't want to code, there's no need to! Nevertheless, if you want to code, you may schedule actions with Jira Query Language (JQL).

Here's a list with some examples of what you can automate in your workflows, under certain conditions, with JMWE:

• Create issues and assign them to members with a specific role
• Link or unlink issues to build their dependencies
• Compute or clear the value of issue fields
• Copy the value of issue fields from one issue to another
• Comment on issues with specific information
• Email all the information that Jira has on issues, whether it includes attachments or not
• Define sequences of actions within the workflow, such as issue status transitions

4. Project Configurator for Jira

You can manually copy projects and their configurations from one Jira instance to another. However, if something could do it for you, that'd be great, right? Well, that’s what Project Configurator for Jira does.

You can export and import full projects — meaning their configuration and data — or just specific project configurations. Those configurations may reference shared objects such as custom fields, workflow schemes, issue type schemes, screen schemes, and workflows. You can also use Project Configurator to export and import other shared objects such as filters, dashboards, and software boards.

If you want to use your project configuration from the development environment to configure the production environment, this Jira add-on is your answer.

There's another advantage to Project Configurator: You can use it to simulate imports. That way, you can spot and solve any problems that might arise if you go ahead with the real import. Later, you can proceed with the import from the simulated import report. This whole import scenario is useful for testing project configuration updates on a staging environment, which precedes the production environment.

Jira add-ons for all purposes and tastes

You may see our selection of Jira add ons as an ecosystem of Jira workflow management, reporting, and project administration tools allows for:

• Easy customization of information extracted from Jira
• Jira data visualization for decision making, process improvement, and progress tracking
• High customization of sophisticated Jira reports
• The automation of Jira manual tasks to save time and reduce manual errors
• Jira work plans for sprints or versions

We can’t let you go before inviting you to try our Jira add-on for yourself. Try out Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira.