4 Best Jira Add-ons To Support Your Projects

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!

We believe there’s a better way for teams to work. That’s why we built a suite of powerful Jira apps. In this post, we’ll share more about Easy Agile Personas, Easy Agile TeamRhythm (formerly User Story Maps), Easy Agile Roadmaps, and Easy Agile Programs. We’ll go over how to use these tools as well as key features that will help your team.

A key principle of working in an agile way is flexibility. It throws away rigid plans and instead embraces an iterative process that evolves with the needs of the customer.

We believe in the power of agile, and we’re passionate about helping teams work better together. To us, that means working with simple tools that are flexible, collaborative, and customer-centric. That's why Easy Agile apps for Jira always keep the customer top of mind. Let's take a deeper look at the plugins that will improve the way your team works in Jira.

Product development with Atlassian Jira Software

Jira cloud solutions take a customer-first approach to designing products. And Atlassian products are commonly used by software development teams.

If you're on an agile team or looking to build your agile capability, a key foundational tool is Atlassian's Jira Software.

With Jira, you can:

• Create Jira workflows to plan, track, and release customer-centric products
• Choose between multiple frameworks, including Kanban, Scrum, or both
• Manage backlogs with complete visibility
• Use structured features designed specifically for sprint planning
• Search for issues and Jira instances with JQL, Jira Query Language
• Improve performance based on real-time data
• Reduce physical dependencies by moving your agile solutions online

Easy Agile Apps for Jira

Jira is an amazing platform with tons of features agile teams can make good use of, but it may not offer the best solution to your specific use case. For specific solutions, such as integrated customer personas or a tool for PI Planning, you’ll need a Jira app from the Atlassian Marketplace, like the Easy Agile tools we’re about to cover.

Easy Agile Personas for Jira

Customer Personas help development teams zero in on a customer-centric approach. They dig deep to understand exactly what customers need and want so that software development teams can deliver on those desires.

Customer personas are vital to understanding how to bring consistent value to clients. They answer questions about customer pain points, behavioral patterns, goals, demographics, buying habits, and more. Effective personas really get to the heart of what makes customers tick so that every software development decision is based on the real people who use the product.

Easy Agile Personas for Jira is designed to produce customer-centric work. It helps teams empathize with customers so they can make development decisions based on what will provide the most value to users.

Our persona tool integrates directly with your current Jira projects. You can create and store customer personas for a smooth experience that prioritizes customer needs every step of the way.

Watch an on-demand demo to learn more. And did we mention our persona template is designed to work with Easy Agile TeamRhythm? You can add personas directly to your TeamRhythm user story map. Our agile plugins are designed to work better together.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm

Backlogs are full of potential, but when you have more than a few items on your list, a flat backlog can quickly become overwhelming. What do you start with first? What fits within the bigger picture? And what’s going to bring the most value to your clients?

Flat maps are bland, void of context, and they provide no insight into the customer journey. It’s like choosing an original Nintendo game when you have a VR headset available. Nice for nostalgia, but not for making stellar products.

Enter the TeamRhythm User Story Map.

Our co-founder, Nicolas Muldoon, describes user story mapping as “a facilitated, curated conversation that brings everyone along for the journey.”

User story mapping is an effective way of organizing and prioritizing your user stories for the purpose of scheduling your work and designing releases. It helps teams visualize the customer’s journey through the creation of your product from start to finish, and it includes all of the tasks to complete along the way.

A user story is a goal or outcome that the user or customer wants to achieve. It’s the smallest unit of work capable of delivering value back to the customer.

Here’s an example of how a user story is typically written: “As a [persona type], I want to [action] so that [benefit].”

It’s your user’s story, so it’s best written from their perspective. Each user story is then added to your backlog, where they can be arranged and prioritized on a user story map according to your scheduled release or sprint. Read our ultimate guide to user story maps to get started.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm is an add-on designed to help teams provide value to customers fast and frequently. Manage and breakdown epics inside the story map, plan core user activities, order stories by priority, edit story summaries, and more — all while integrating seamlessly with your agile boards in Jira.

It’s time to transform your flat product backlog into an impactful and visual representation of the customer journey. Follow our Easy Agile TeamRhythm to see what we’re currently working on and what functionality is coming up next.

Easy Agile Programs Jira plugin

Program Increment (PI) Planning involves intense, focused planning to determine what needs to happen when and how everything connects. It’s when product managers can review the backlog, communicate with stakeholders, and ultimately decide what next steps will bring the most value.

The problem is these planning sessions can get quite complicated, and it’s difficult to track everything on a physical Program Board. Online agile tools help teams consolidate information so they can see the big picture. They prevent lost information, misinformation, poor test management, double handling, and inaccessibility, all while maintaining the visual process of PI Planning.

Easy Agile Programs for Jira is the complete PI Planning solution for agile teams. It’s the most effective way to visualize programs within Jira. Keep all the parts you like from your physical Program Board while increasing automation and getting rid of overwhelming layers of sticky notes and connectors. Plus, with an online tool, you can work as a team remotely while doing PI Planning.

You can plan your Program Increment with digital cards with all the string you need for solving complex problems. Our app connects to Jira dashboards to help you seamlessly manage programs, configure priorities, and streamline visibility. With a Jira PI Planning app, you’ll gain better context, a streamlined workflow, increased collaboration, and improved transparency.

Watch our on-demand demo and follow our Easy Agile Programs roadmap for the latest product updates.

Easy Agile Roadmaps Jira plugin

Product roadmaps are an agile staple. They provide an iterative and collaborative process, so the software development team can continually provide value to customers and stakeholders.

Unlike static Gantt Charts or Excel Sheets, roadmaps are fluid and versatile. They are a living document that represents the team’s hopes at a specific time, based on the current needs of the customer. As needs and demands evolve, so does the roadmap.

Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira help teams align around a product vision to sequence the most critical features for customer delivery. Our Roadmaps allow teams to add subtask themes, date markers, custom fields, split scheduled work, track progress, and export any roadmap to share with stakeholders.

It’s intuitive and simple to use for everyone on your team from product managers to developers to stakeholders. Easy Agile Roadmaps connect seamlessly with your Jira instance to plan Jira issues directly from the issues panel. It’s the simplest and most flexible roadmapping tool for Jira with one-click drag and drop functionality and a super-clean user experience.

You’ll love visualizing your process, and you’ll love how simple it is to get started. Learn how to create a Jira roadmap using Easy Agile Roadmaps or watch a demo for more information.

Try any Easy Agile Jira plugin free for 30 days

Each of our Easy Agile Jira plugins is available free for 30 days, so you can begin using them without any commitments. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact our team.

Anyone working in the agile environment would agree there are a million different terms to wrap your head around. As a marketer with no agile or software development experience, this is definitely true for me. Once you comprehend the definition, you are then tasked with understanding the role each play in the development life cycle and how they integrate with the associated agile methodology 🤯

In an attempt to alleviate any confusion, It's only fitting a couple of those key terms are deciphered … sprints and versions. What teams use them? What are they actually referring to? How do they contribute to the development life cycle?

Before diving into it, it’s important to consider context. Each teams environment will be unique and sprints and versions may be integrated differently. The goal of this blog post is to provide a wholesome understanding of both, in which you can take this information as the foundations for one to build upon, adjust to suit your teams environment and work at a sustainable pace.

Versions in a nutshell

In essence, a version is the culmination of your teams work that you will ship to the customer. It often includes a set of features and fixes that are released together as a single update to your product. Both scrum and kanban teams can work in versions.

Versions and releases are often used interchangeably, and look to a specific point in time or a milestone for your team to work towards. In Jira, working in versions assists the team with organising issues. We can consider a version as a container of issues that have all been stamped with a customer release number. The version or release is the result of what your team has been working on. It’s at this stage the latest version is ready to be shipped.

Sprints in a nutshell

At the core a sprint is a fixed block of time. During which development teams aim to implement and deliver improvements or a new feature for a product. More holistically, you might consider a sprint as a type of cadence for how your team works. Scrum teams work in sprints, whereas kanban teams do not. A sprint caters for fixed timeframes which work well in scrum, kanban calls for the team to adopt a more continuous flow of work hence sprints are not typically followed.

In Jira, the work you complete during a sprint comes from your backlog. Once you have filled your sprint with issues or stories to action, your team can now start working. At the end of the sprint the idea is to have a working component of the product. Working in sprints give your team the chance to organise your workload into smaller more manageable chunks of work. You may choose to move the issues you have worked on during a sprint to the version you will ship to the customer.

Contrast

It often helps to seperate sprints and versions by considering the motive. Sprints focus on the internal work to be completed and a version as the external outputs that the customer will receive.The main difference is to consider sprints as time-boxes and versions as a specific point in time.

Versions are more customer focused, where as sprints are more specific to the teams capacity. In Jira, when selecting the issues from your backlog a scrum team will prioritise issues into sprints and a kanban team will always take the top item and work towards the version.

Some teams may organise sprints around completing work for a specific version. For example, a scrum team might complete four sprints before the output reaches the version, where as a kanban team adopts a less structured way of working towards the latest release.

For the most part, the principle of both sprints and versions in Jira is to allow your team to filter your stories and issues in a way that prioritises the work to optimise delivery and improve efficiency. One of the many benefits of working in an agile team is the chance to acknowledge what’s working and how to improve it in the future. So whilst sprints or versions work for you now, it might not always be the case.

Make of that what you will, and consider how the framework of sprints and versions will work best in your environment to create your own teams methodology. As a way to filter your teams focus and prioritise your backlog into sprints or versions, consider Easy Agile’s User Story Maps for Jira.

Check out our blog to find out more!

The Ultimate Guide to User Story Mapping