Agile is a software development methodology that has an iterative approach to development, basically billing and releasing software incrementally from the start of the project rather than delivering everything all at once at the end.

Agile Principles

-> Iterative development

-> Adaptive to changing requirements

-> Frequent delivery

-> Close collaboration between cross-functional teams

JIRA supports two methodologies - SCRUM and KANBAN.

SCRUM is the most highly recognized agile methodology. It breaks the project down into smaller bits based on functionality represented by epics and user stories.

Epics - larger body of work, broken into stories.

User Story - or story, smallest unit of work. It can represent a feature that is to be developed. User stories are prioritized. Development is performed in short cycles, known as Sprints. Sprints are the heartbeat of scrum, where ideas are turned into values.

Sprint Flow

All the features wanted to build in the form of user stories is included in the product backlog. These features or stories get prioritized. A group of features are selected from the product backlog and made into the sprint backlog and within 2-4 weeks the development team takes the ticket from the sprint backlog and gets them to a done stage by the end of the sprint.

During this time, the team has a daily 15 min scrum meeting at the same place and time to discuss the progress of the sprint and make sure things are on track. By the end of the sprint the team should have a shippable group of features that can be reviewed by the customers.

Scrum Roles

Product Owner -> Defines vision of the product - what should be built and why

Development Team -> Builds the product

Scrum Master -> Facilitates the scrum process

Scrum Events

Sprint planning -> Sprint backlog is created by selecting the highest priority features from the product backlog with which the development team can work on during the next sprint.

Daily scrum -> Team members does a meeting about their work progress for 15 minutes mainly facilitated by the scrum master.

Sprint Review and Retrospective

Review -> what was completed/ not completed.

Retrospective -> what went well during sprint and what could be improved for next sprint.

Scrum Print Board

The team can monitor and update the progress of work through scrum print board. It is designed in the form of columns such as to do, progress, done. This looks different for every team. Extra columns can also be added.

Kanban

-> A simpler form of agile development.

-> It also has a board to define the flow of work, but no sprint involved.

-> Kanban board - visualizes the workflow

-> Limit on WIP ( work in progress) items

-> Monitor, adapt, and improve

Kanban board looks almost exactly like a scrum board. There are four columns. The ‘ backlog’ column can represent all the tickets or features that need to be worked on. ‘Selected for development column’ will only include the highest priority ticket and the developers will only start working on tickets that are in this column. In the ‘in progress’ column, the WIP limit is set.

SCRUM: Use for projects with defined features.

KANBAN: Use for support, unpredictable development.

Jira Terms

Issues -> It is the essence of Jira which represents any work item that requires an action from a person. Epic, story, bug, tasks, etc are all issues. Every ticket created in Jira is referred to as an issue.

Projects -> Collection of issues.

Workflow -> A set of statuses that an issue in a project can have along with the transition between the statuses that the issue can go through.

Versions -> Heip track releases of software. In scrum, a version is preplanned and released when the plan work is complete. In kanban, a version can be released at any time and will contain all the issues that are complete at that time.

Components -> Features offered to create sub-sections of a project, used to group issues within a project.

That was all about Agile and Jira Concepts.

Drop a like and share it if you found it informative.

Have a productive day, let's meet in the next blog!