Agile, Scrum, and JIRA, are some the popular buzzwords in project management. Gone are the Waterfall days and following the classic SDLC lifecycle. It is all Agile now. Agile working is an iterative and incremental approach to delivering requirements throughout the project life cycle.
The main difference between the waterfall and agile approach is that in agile, the team does not follow a structured plan from the start until the end of the project. There is always customer collaboration and responding to changes. Comprehensive documentation takes a backseat making way to working solutions. As stated in the Agile manifesto, agile processes promote sustainable development. Working software is the priority and building projects around motivated people is the focus.
Scrum is one of the implementations of agile methodology. It is a framework for effective team collaboration to deliver products of highest value.
Why Scrum?
Scrum is a well-defined process framework made up of short duration tasks. It is structured, fast paced and transparent. Scrum works well with localized teams.
Scrum can be used to manage and develop products through various processes and techniques. The framework consists of scrum teams and their associated roles, events, artifacts, and rules. Four main functionalities of scrum framework are: sprint planning, daily scrum meetings, sprints, and retrospectives.
The Scrum team consists of a Product Owner, the Development Team, and a Scrum Master. These teams are self-organizing and do not require directives from outside the team. The team has all the competencies required to accomplish the work without any dependency on outside resource.
Sprint is the heart of Scrum. It is a time-box approach that focuses on delivering a completed and releasable product. Each sprint duration usually lasts for 2 weeks. Sprint planning involves organizing and scheduling the work that will be performed during the sprint. Daily scrum is a short, time-boxed meeting that is held everyday for the development team. This meeting inspects progress toward the sprint goal. Sprint retrospective occurs after the sprint review and before the next sprint planning. During the retrospective meeting, the scrum team inspects itself and makes pointers for improvement during the next sprint.
One of the key scrum artifacts is Product Backlog. It is an ordered list of all the requirements that encompasses the project needs. It is maintained by the Product Owner. Product backlog is always refined and updated to reflect the latest development changes. Higher ordered items are tackled first in the backlog.
Using Jira for Scrum
Jira is an agile project management tool that supports various agile methodology such as Scrum and Kanban. It provides various tools to manage all the key Scrum tasks such as sprint planning, daily scrums, and sprint retrospective.
In Jira, “issue” stands for individual task of a project. Issues can be of different types such as sub-task, bug, story and improvement. Components in Jira are sub-sections of a project that is used to group issues of a particular type. When an issue is created in Jira, it is assigned a screen where all the issue details are grouped. Issues are assigned status and priority. The product backlog lists all the issues based on its priority. Backlog becomes the center of sprint planning. During sprint meeting issues are re-prioritized in real-time. A Jira workflow outlines the transition of an issue during its life-cycle i.e. from being created until it is Closed. Creating larger user stories in Jira is possible through the issue type known as epic. Epic breaks a large issue into smaller stories. Scrum boards provide a visual representation of all the tasks in a given sprint. It can be customized based on each project’s requirements. It provides a quick snapshot of the work progress at the end of each sprint.
Sprint permission can be used to authorize access to specific tasks in Jira to the team members. Progress of tasks in Jira is followed via various reports. Burndown chart is used to track the total work remaining and the estimated time required to reach the sprint goal. Sprint report helps to review the team’s performance and the status of issues in the backlog. Likewise, Epic report is used to track the progress of each epic. Release burndown chart tracks the release date of the project and helps to manage any bottlenecks to meet the project deadline. Some of the other reports available in Jira are, Version report, Velocity chart, Control chart, and Cumulative flow diagram.
Jira also supports Kanban methodology. Kanban is less structured than scrum and does not follow a specific process framework. Work is tracked using a Kanban board and cards that helps to visualize the workflow. Work is organized on the Kanban board as To Do, Doing, and Done. It is easier and clearer to see project progress in kanban. However, tasks are not time-boxed in kanban. Team can decide on the number of issues to be displayed in each status.
Overall the Agile methodology, whether it is Scrum or Kanban have found widespread usage in project management. It is here to stay, as it provides rapid response to change, and agile development allows much more flexibility than traditional methods. The process of continuous planning and feedback ensures changes are accommodated without huge impact to the budget or schedule of projects. Get a hang of implementing scrum framework in Jira through this comprehensive tutorial from Atlassian.
