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Introduction:
Do you know how many percentage of companies has Agile helped to become more successful? It's 98 %. After adopting Agile, companies have experienced an average 60% growth in revenue and profit. Atleast 71% of U.S. companies are now using Agile.
Jira is an Agile project management tool which supports any methodology be it in Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Prgramming (XP), Feature- driven development (FDD) , Dynamic Systems Development Method ( DSDM), Crystal or Lean.
In this blog we will know how any Project attain maximum success rate by using Agile methodology with the help of Jira software.
Key Words :
Agile, Jira, Scrum, Sprint
What is Agile?
Agile is an approach to project management that leans heavily on short time frames, adaptability, and iteration.
Agile is the ability to create and respond to change. It is a way of dealing with, and ultimately succeeding in, an uncertain and turbulent environment.
One thing that separates Agile from other approaches to software development is the focus on the people doing the work and how they work together. Solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams utilizing the appropriate practices for their context.
There’s a big focus in the Agile software development community on collaboration and the self-organizing team.
Key Agile Concepts:
User stories :
In consultation with the customer or product owner, the team divides up the work to be done into functional increments called “user stories.” Each user story is expected to yield a contribution to the value of the overall product.
Personas:
When the project calls for it – for instance when user experience is a major factor in project outcomes – the team crafts detailed, synthetic biographies of fictitious users of the future product: these are called “personas.”
Team:
A “team” in the Agile sense is a small group of people, assigned to the same project or effort, nearly all of them on a full-time basis. A small minority of team members may be part-time contributors, or may have competing responsibilities.
Incremental Development:
Nearly all Agile teams favor an incremental development strategy; in an Agile context, this means that each successive version of the product is usable, and each builds upon the previous version by adding user-visible functionality.
Iterative Development:
Agile projects are iterative insofar as they intentionally allow for “repeating” software development activities, and for potentially “revisiting” the same work products.
Milestone Retrospective:
Once a project has been underway for some time, or at the end of the project, all of the team’s permanent members (not just the developers) invests from one to three days in a detailed analysis of the project’s significant events.
Phases of Agile :
1. Scope out and prioritize projects:
During the first step of the agile software development life cycle, the team scopes out and prioritizes projects. Some teams may work on more than one project at the same time depending on the department’s organization.
For each concept, you should define the business opportunity and determine the time and work it’ll take to complete the project. Based on this information, you can assess technical and economic feasibility and decide which projects are worth pursuing.
2. Diagram requirements for the initial sprint :
Once you have identified the project, work with stakeholders to determine requirements. You might want to use user flow diagrams or high-level UML diagrams to demonstrate how the new feature should function and how it will fit into your existing system.
3. Construction/iteration:
Once a team has defined requirements for the initial sprint based on stakeholder feedback and requirements, the work begins. UX designers and developers begin work on their first iteration of the project, with the goal of having a working product to launch at the end of the sprint. Remember, the product will undergo various rounds of revisions, so this first iteration might only include the bare minimum functionality. The team can and will have additional sprints to expand upon the overall product.
4. Release the iteration into production:
You’re nearly ready to release your product into the world. Finish up this software iteration with the following steps:
· Test the system. Your quality assurance (QA) team should test functionality, detect bugs, and record wins and losses.
· Address any defects.
· Finalize system and user documentation. Lucidchart can help you visualize your code through UML diagrams or demonstrate user flows so everyone understands how the system functions and how they can build upon it further.
· Release the iteration into production.
5. Production and ongoing support for the software release:
This phase involves ongoing support for the software release. In other words, your team should keep the system running smoothly and show users how to use it. The production phase ends when support has ended or when the release is planned for retirement.
6. Retirement:
During the retirement phase, you remove the system release from production, typically when you want to replace a system with a new release or when the system becomes redundant, obsolete, or contrary to your business model.
Creation of Jira Board :
There are some prerequisites to create Jira board.
1. Creating Jira Software Account
2. Creating Jira Software Project
Sprints - Heartbeats of Scrum:
A sprint is a short, time-boxed period when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work.
“With scrum, a product is built in a series of iterations called sprints that break down big, complex projects into bite-sized pieces," said Megan Cook, Group Product Manager for Jira Software at Atlassian.
Sprints are the heartbeats of Scrum as ideas turn into values here.
Sprints enable predictability by ensuring that the Scrum Team inspects and adapts toward the Product Goal and Sprint Goal each Sprint.
Scrum Ceremony:
Sprint Planning:
The team then creates a plan for how they will build the backlog items and get them “Done” before the end of the sprint. The work items chosen and the plan for how to get them done is called the sprint backlog. By the end of sprint planning the team is ready to start work on the sprint backlog, taking items from the backlog, to “In-progress,” and “Done."
Daily Standup:
During a sprint, the team checks in during the daily scrum, or standup , about how the work is progressing. The goal of this meeting is to surface any blockers and challenges that would impact the teams ability to deliver the sprint goal.
Sprint Review:
After a sprint, the team demonstrates what they’ve completed during the sprint review. Here team showcase their work to stakeholders and teammates before it hits production.
Sprint Retrospective:
This is teams opportunity to identify areas of improvement for the next sprint. With that, team is ready to start next sprint cycle.
Advantages of Jira :
1. Built for Agile and Scrum management
Jira Software primarily focuses on Agile Project Management offering features that are geared towards Scrum and Kanban methodologies.
Use it for tracking Agile project data such as:
User stories: Each software productfeature that needs to be developed
Story Points: The effort you’ll need to complete your user stories
Sprints: The time taken to complete a section of the project. A sprint can last anywhere from 1 – 4 weeks
You can also easily reorder the items in your product backlog, such as bugs, software issues, and user stories through the tool’s intuitive drag and drop function.
2. Great for issue management:
By having a single view – teams can prioritize what features or bugs they should work on during the next release.
3. Highly customizable:
Whether you’re talking a project management software, issue tracking tool, task managementtool, Jira can be customized to fit any requirement. You can even customize workflows, reports, Scrum boards, and more.
Jira integrates with tons of popular third-party software to make work easier.
Charts and Graphs to track Sprint progress:
Jira can also create Agile software development reports to help you keep track of your progresson engineering projects… Here are a few reports they offer:
User workload: Shows how much work a team member has been allocated, and how long it should take
Average age: Shows the average age (in days) of unresolved issues or tasks :in your backlog
Recently created issues: Shows the rate at which new issues (software bug reports) are being created
Conclusion:
Agile is a Software Development methodology which focuses on continuous improvement with the help of different frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, Crystal , Lean, etc. Jira is project management tool which is used to visualize the workflow of the project. Jira is perfect for agile project management, working fast, and delivering results for customers.
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