Scrum Tools: Jira Agile (formerly Greenhopper)

Jira Agile

The next few posts are going to talk about different tools that you can use to manage the Scrum process. There are quite a few out there, but I"ll start with the one I'm currently using, Jira Agile. It was formerly known as Greenhopper and is part of the Jira family of the Atlassian bug tracking and project management products.  Many Open Source projects use Atlassian tools to manage development so lots of people are familiar with Jira, for better or worse.

I've taken a liking to it, but it may be that I've not had much to compare it to. Prior to adopting Scrum/Agile my company used Bugzilla for bug tracking and that was it, but we needed a tool to help manage Scrum online since our team has many remote members. Many teams find that a large white board with post-it notes and an Excel spreadsheet for the product backlog works great; we needed a virtual whiteboard instead of a physical one.

We now use Jira Agile for bug tracking as well as the Scrum management process, as all new issues are now managed as part of the product backlog.  Now that I've been using the tool for a while, I'm efficient in inputing the data, updating items, and such.  It took a while to get the hang of where everything was located, but now I can easily update our estimates and move stories around when we are in the middle of our sprint planning meeting.

From a cost perspective, price is pretty reasonable and you can opt for a cloud-hosted site or create a local installation.

Things I like about Jira Agile:

• The Work view of the Agile Scrum Board is a really useful way to visualize the status of your stories. It shows all the stories in the current sprint, who they are assigned to, and in what stage they are in. This view is shown in the picture above. You can customize the workflow and have different lanes as needed for your process. We happen to use To Do, In Progress, In Testing, In Review, and Done.  I bring this up during every daily Scrum meeting and use it to refer to when team members are discussing their status.
• The Plan view of the Agile Scrum Board lets you easily reorder the product backlog and move stories into different sprints.  It can get a little clunky dragging when your backlog gets big, but  overall this feature is very useful.
• You can do original estimates in story points, then track time in hours once stories have been moved to sprints.  Velocity can then be expressed in story points for stories completed.  You can also do original estimates in hours and calculate velocity that way if you so desire.
• The Report view of the Agile Scrum Board automatically calculates sprint burndown and velocity charts for you throughout the sprint.  Other areas of the system allow you to calculate release burndowns for stories assigned to a particular release version.

Things I dislike about Jira Agile:

• In the Plan view of the Agile Scrum Board you can sort Epics by priority in the left hand pane, but you can't view the priority order of these Epics in any other way that I can figure out. I can search for and get a report of all Epics, but cannot seem to sort them in the priority order shown here.
• Email notifications aren't very good.  Email notifications are configured to be sent whenever certain activities take place, like when a story moves from In Progress to In Testing. However, this can cause a lot of clutter because Jira sends one email for each piece of data that is changed.  I think that Jira should bundle up changes and send a summary only of changes done say in a 5 minute window. Typically when you update a story you might update the hours worked, add a comment, and change status.  You'd like to get just one email instead of 3.
• There was some pain around getting everyone to have an easy to use view of their currently assigned sprint stories.  Our solution was to use the Work view and create filters to show only stories assigned to you, or stories that you are assigned or are watching.

I've gotten into a groove using the tool and I can say that I would recommend it, especially if you need to track bugs for an existing system.  In the next few posts I am going to reevaluate some other Scrum and Agile tools to see how they measure up.

What tools do you prefer for Agile and Scrum?