Jira Software: Agile project management tools for your teams
Jira Software provides a solid foundation that helps teams get work done in a scalable manner while making team collaboration easier. It helps teams plan, track, and release their products quicker and more efficiently. It provides planning and roadmap tools that enable teams to manage budgets, stakeholders, and feature requirements. Without a roadmap that provides a holistic view, teams risk losing sight of the big picture and working in silos. Therefore, it benefits stakeholders, leaders, and project teams by maintaining clarity around work progress. Jira helps create tasks for yourself and other team members to work on, providing reminders, due dates, and details. It allows you to utilise subtasks to divide larger work items into digestible pieces, and others can track the status. Jira also integrates with a multitude of CI/CD that fosters a culture of collaboration across DevOps teams.
Simply put, Jira is used for:
- Software Development
- Agile methodology
- Task Management
- Project Management
- Test Case Management
- Bug Tracking
Why is Jira used for agile?
Jira Software is an agile project management tool that supports any agile methodology, scrum, kanban or your unique approach. The primary focus of agile methodology is to deliver quickly and efficiently without impacting quality, and Jira Software has all the necessary functions for this. It provides agile boards, roadmaps, backlogs, and reports and allows you to plan, track, and manage all your development projects using a single tool. Scrum and Kanban boards in Jira are task management hubs where tasks can be mapped with customisable workflows. And the boards provide transparency across teamwork and the status of every work item.
One of the main reasons why Jira is for agile teams is because it makes continuous collaboration possible. Teams could be improved by participating in the sprint planning meeting, collectively adjusting sprint scope, checking velocity, and re-prioritising issues in real time. Jira is amazing because all of these can be done in one platform, especially with the integrations of apps; teams will achieve continuous improvement easily.
What is the difference between Scrum and Kanban board?
There are some key differences between the two:
- Team roles are clearly defined in scrum. It shows who the product owner and scrum master are, whereas Kanban has no pre-defined roles.
- Kanban board is used throughout the lifecycle of a project, and a scrum board is cleared after each sprint. Therefore, scrum sprints have start and stop dates, while kanban doesn’t
- Scrum board has a set number of tasks and strict deadline, while kanban boards are more flexible regarding task assigning and timing. In Kanban, tasks can be reassigned, reprioritised, or updated when needed.
- Kanban allows for changes to be made and iterations and continuous improvement before the completion of a project, while scrum strongly discourages any changes during the sprint.
Although there are differences, Kanban works well with Scrum or any other Agile method. Kanban can visualise, improve workflow and maximise efficiency.
How to use Jira for Continuous Integration and Delivery
When a product can only work a certain way, your team’s productivity will be at risk. If your products lack the capability to be integrated with other products and customised especially when bridging the gap between different teams, they will suffer from the siloed processes. Let's say, for example, every time you make a sale, your sales and accounting team have to manually communicate because the products they are using don’t work together. This will delay the whole process, and your teams will use their precious time to work on more innovative tasks. However, with Jira, you don't need to worry. Jira integrates with a number of first and third-party tools throughout the DevOps lifecycle, including build and deployment tools like Bitbucket, Github and knowledge management tools like Confluence. With Jira, you can extend the capabilities of your products while integrating additional features to build the strategies that work best for you. Such functionality reduces your change failure rate by building workflows around your deployment pipeline. And you will be able to deploy more often with a clearer view of what's ready for release. In fact, according to Atlassian, Jira software increases deployments by 900% and decreases cycle time by 50%. As a result of integrated pipelines into Jira, mean time to resolve (MTTR) production issues and downtime for your customers will be reduced.
What is Jira automation?
Automation lets you focus on the work that matters by removing the need to perform manual, repetitive tasks. In Jira, your teams can automate their processes and workflows with a simple rule builder. The simple rule builder allows you to configure powerful automation rules that include auto-assigning issues to members of your team in a balanced fashion. Through Jira integration, apps such as ScriptRunner can be integrated to solve the challenges you face daily in Jira when writing scripts. It automates bulk actions, creates scripted fields and allows your work to be visible across teams, which makes collaboration easy. Not surprisingly, 87% of Jira automation users say it makes it easier to scale Jira within their organisations.
Conclusion
To bridge the gap between your organisation’s strategies and your teams' capabilities, using tools like Jira software will be the most feasible solution. Your teams may be working hard but not efficiently if your organisation’s toolsets are not streamlining your team’s workflow. An agile project management tool like Jira helps teams practice CI/CD, which is fundamental for DevOps. Open DevOps powered by Jira software automatically integrates Atlassian partner tools, and existing tools can be swapped out with just a few clicks. Many organisations leverage Jira as a workflow management tool to improve their teams' and organisations' overall efficiency and effectiveness.
DevOps cannot be bought. It has to be built in the way that works best for your teams. And software like Jira offers a number of integration options. That's why knowing what tools and combinations optimise your teams' workflow and productivity is important. To do that, you must decide how you work as a team first, then let the software work around you. This might sound like a lot of work. But don’t worry. Catapult is here to help you. We can help you from the first stage, enhancing how your teams work with the agile and DevOps approach designed by our DevOps experts to guide you through every step. We will recommend the software and toolsets that suit your teams. We are a trusted Atlassian silver solution partner. If you are interested in our Atlassian support, visit our service page here. Or, if you are interested in getting started with Jira or any Atlassian product, contact us today.