Jira apps for agile teams

High-performing agile teams thrive on adaptability, collaboration, and continuous improvement. But for learning to truly happen, teams need psychological safety—a culture where people feel comfortable speaking up, sharing ideas, and acknowledging failures without fear of judgment. One of the most overlooked aspects of team inclusion in agile team dynamics is how people learn. Not everyone processes information the same way, and understanding diverse learning styles can help create environments where all team members feel supported, engaged, and empowered to contribute.

Want to find out your specific learning preferences? Download your free Learning Style Quiz and Guide on how each learner type absorbs knowledge best.

Understanding Learning Styles and Learner Types

Think of a time you learned something quickly and effectively, and try to pinpoint what made it work for you. If it was a learning experience you enjoyed and found useful, the way the information was presented was probably well aligned with the way your brain likes to process new knowledge. For some people, that might look like videos, or a chance to practice and apply, or having time to read and take notes down.

Understanding your own learner type and how you best process information will improve your self-awareness at work, enabling you to learn more effectively and advocate for your learning needs.

But why is it important to understand the learner types of those around you?

• Team awareness → Adapt to others, improve team collaboration and inclusion
• Leaders & trainers → Support diverse learners, create accessible environments
• Inclusion → Recognizing and valuing different ways people process information and communicate
• Psychological safety → People learn best when they feel safe to ask, experiment and fail

Before we get into looking at the four learning styles, let’s take a moment to recognize that learning preferences aren’t one-size-fits-all—many people have a mix of preferences and may not fit neatly into just one category. Diverse learners—those who process, absorb, and express knowledge in different ways—benefit from flexible approaches, and may align with more than one learning style, parts of a few, or none at all. Neurodiversity in the workplace is an important consideration here—neurodivergent individuals often have unique information processing styles and may need additional support to ensure they can engage effectively. The key is to find what works best for you and create an environment where everyone can learn in their own way.

The VARK Learning Model: Four Learner Types

The VARK learning model categorizes learners into four main types:

Psychological Safety & Team Inclusion in Agile

Now that you understand your own learning style—and that others may learn very differently—let’s talk about how this contributes to team effectiveness.

Learning, growth, and innovation are cornerstones of high-performing agile teams, but these things don’t happen in isolation. They can really only happen in environments where people feel safe to ask questions, experiment, and share ideas. It is well known that a key factor of successful and effective agile teams is their positive, healthy culture, and this is where psychological safety and inclusion come in.

Psychological safety and inclusion are essential for agile teams because they:

• enable people to learn and grow
• help teams adapt and change quickly
• reduce fear of failure, leading to innovation
• prevent misalignment and financial loss due to fear of speaking up

Inclusion and psychological safety aren’t just ‘nice to have’ - they make agile work.

➡️ What is inclusion?

Ensuring that everyone, regardless of background, identity, or learning style, has equal opportunity to contribute, feel valued, and thrive in a team or workplace.

How to foster inclusion in the workplace:

• Adapt communication and learning approaches to support different learner types.
• Create accessible ways for everyone to engage e.g. visuals, discussions, written formats, hands-on activities.
• Actively seek out and respect different perspectives in meetings, planning, and decision-making.
• Ensure all voices are heard by structuring discussions to prevent dominant voices from taking over.

➡️ What is psychological safety?

A team environment where individuals feel safe to speak up, take risks, ask questions, and share ideas without fear of judgment, rejection, or punishment.

How to build psychological safety in the workplace:

• Normalize giving and receiving feedback in a constructive, blame-free way.
• Encourage curiosity—frame mistakes as learning opportunities rather than failures.
• Leaders should model vulnerability by admitting when they don’t have all the answers.
• Create a culture where all input is valued by acknowledging contributions, even if they aren’t implemented.

Agility is a learning process

The strongest agile teams learn, adapt, and have a culture of continuous improvement. Psychological safety enables teams to ask questions, challenge ideas, and experiment without fear - key to fast and effective feedback mechanisms.

Why psychological safety matters for all learners…

People process information differently—safe environments let all learners express needs, engage in their way, and contribute fully. Diverse learners, including neurodivergent team members, may not fit one learning type—psychological safety ensures they can ask for what they need without judgment, and feel valued for the way they engage with and process information.

The impact on agility?

• Align: Safety fosters open discussion → better decisions, clear priorities.
• Improve: Teams feel safe to experiment → faster learning, better solutions.
• Inform: Feedback flows freely → smarter investment decisions, stronger adaptability.

What does this look like in practice?

Retrospectives: The Ultimate Learning & Inclusion Space

Retrospectives are where Agile teams pause to reflect, learn, and improve. But for a retro to be effective, it must be psychologically safe and inclusive—because without trust, learning can’t happen.

So, what makes a retrospective psychologically safe and inclusive?

✅ All voices are heard → Everyone, regardless of communication or learning style, has a way to contribute.
✅ Blame-free reflection → The focus is on learning and improving, not pointing fingers.
✅ Actionable follow-through → The team sees real change as a result of their input, building trust.

How to Create Inclusive & Safe Retros

To ensure your retrospectives work for all learning styles, consider:

• Use multiple ways to gather input → Anonymous feedback, written reflections, open discussion, or interactive boards.
• Encourage different communication styles → Some may prefer speaking up in the moment, while others need time to process and write.
• Follow through on feedback → If teams don’t see changes happen, engagement will drop.

A great retro is not just a meeting—it’s a space for learning, collaboration, and trust-building. And the right tools can help.

How Easy Agile TeamRhythm Helps Agile Teams Run Inclusive, Psychologically Safe Retros

While Easy Agile TeamRhythm is a Jira app built for creating, estimating, and sequencing work at a team level on an interactive user story map, it is also a platform for running engaging and effective agile retrospectives. The retrospectives feature of Easy Agile TeamRhythm allows uses to create and track action items from retros by group feedback, identifying themes, and converting them into Jira issues for each planning. You can use templates, mood surveys, and timers to keep your ceremonies focused and effective.

Build collaboration and improve team alignment

Easy Agile TeamRhythm makes team retrospectives boards the hub for learning and improvement, allowing teams to celebrate wins, share learnings, and improve their team alignment and workflow. The ability to set privacy and permissions ensures that team information is only available to those your team trusts.

How Easy Agile TeamRhythm features create psychological safety and inclusion

Final thoughts

Inclusion and psychological safety aren’t just concepts—they’re the foundation of high-performing Agile teams. By recognizing different learning styles, creating space for all voices, and fostering a culture where people feel safe to learn and experiment, teams can truly thrive. What’s one thing you’ll do to make your Agile team more inclusive, supportive, and effective? Small changes can have a big impact.

Start building more inclusive, collaborative teams

Download your free copy of the Learning Style Quiz. Use it to gain lasting insights into how your team learns and works best.

Across hundreds of teams, we saw the same pattern: retrospectives were happening regularly, thoughtfully - and yet, less than half the retrospective action items ever got completed. Teams kept identifying valuable improvements, but those improvements stalled in execution. Instead of driving change, the same issues resurfaced sprint after sprint.

When we spoke with customers, they weren’t unclear on what to improve - they were actually stuck on how to follow through. The lack of visibility, accountability, and prioritization made progress feel out of reach.

That frustration led us to rethink how we approach retrospectives. Not just in the room, but in the days and weeks that follow. Because while most teams know how to reflect, far fewer know how to move forward.

Want to dive straight into action? Grab our free Retrospective Action Template here - a clear, practical guide to help your team stop spinning in circles and start making progress that actually sticks.

Or if you're keen to understand the deeper why behind this challenge, keep reading.

The invisible graveyard of good ideas

Think back to your last few retros. You likely surfaced blockers, celebrated wins, maybe even explored a tough team dynamic. The discussion probably felt honest - valuable, even.

Now ask yourself: What actually changed as a result?

Too often, retrospective action items, even the well-intentioned ones, are lost to the shuffle of a new sprint. The Jira board fills up, the deadline looms, and those carefully considered ideas fade into the background.

It’s not that teams don’t care. It’s that we often lack a system for taking action from team retrospectives in a way that’s trackable and integrated with our actual work.

We’ve seen the pattern: teams revisit the same problems retro after retro. Over time, that repetition chips away at trust. "Didn’t we already talk about this?" becomes the refrain, and eventually, the retro starts to feel like a ritual with no reward.

The follow-through problem

Most retrospectives don’t fail during the session itself; they falter in the days and weeks afterward. According to a poll in PMI's community, nearly two-thirds of respondents implemented fewer than 25% of the ideas from their retros - none reported implementing more than 75%.

"If your team consistently creates action items during Retrospectives but rarely completes them, you’re not alone. Unfinished action items are a major productivity killer and lead to stalled progress. The key to real improvement isn’t in creating long lists—it’s in following through. By treating Retrospective action items with the same importance as other Sprint tasks, your team can finally break the cycle of unfinished improvements and see real, beneficial change, individually and at the team level." - Stefan Wolpers, Age of Product

Follow-throughs often break down because of:

• Lack of clear ownership‍

When an action item belongs to 'everyone', it ends up belonging to no one. Teams that don’t assign a specific owner are less likely to see the item through. Accountability is a critical lever for ensuring follow-through and it’s often overlooked, especially in team-wide retros.

• No deadlines:

Action items without a timebox drift into the background. Teams frequently delay or deprioritize tasks that aren’t linked to specific sprint milestones or review points. Time-bound goals make follow-up tangible and measurable.

• Vague outcomes:

Teams often fall into the trap of writing retrospective items as intentions rather than actions. Broad phrases like “improve communication” or “fix our process” lack specificity. Without a clear 'what' and 'how', nothing moves.

• Too many actions:

When every idea from the retro becomes an action item, focus disappears. Prioritization is vital. Teams need to pick one or two meaningful improvements that are realistic for the sprint ahead. Otherwise, everything feels equally important—and nothing gets done.

• Poor visibility:

Action items are often scattered - living in whiteboards, static docs, or someone's memory. If teams can’t see what they committed to, they won’t act on it. Integrating follow-up tasks into the team’s daily tooling (like Easy Agile TeamRhythm in Jira) makes accountability unavoidable.

All of these factors add up to the same end result: a wide gap between good intentions and real progress. In our own usage data of Easy Agile TeamRhythm, teams were completing only 40–50% of their retrospective action items. After releasing features to surface and track incomplete actions, that completion rate jumped to 65%. Better follow-throughs, not just better conversations, are needed to drive real progress.

Common retrospective anti-patterns and their solutions

nti-patterns are common but counterproductive approaches to recurring problems that initially appear helpful but ultimately lead to negative outcomes. Unlike simple mistakes, anti-patterns are deceptive - they feel like the right thing to do in the moment but create deeper issues over time.

Teams consistently struggle with follow-through due to a combination of anti-patterns that weaken accountability and momentum. Here are the most common retrospective anti-patterns we see and how to address them:

1. The groundhog day pattern

Anti-pattern: The retrospective never changes in format, venue, or length, leading to the same issues being discussed repeatedly without resolution.

Why it happens: Teams fall into comfortable routines that feel "safe" but become stale and ineffective over time.

Solution: Vary your retrospective format regularly. Use different techniques like Start-Stop-Continue, 5 Whys, or Timeline Retrospectives. Change venues when possible - even moving from a conference room to an open space can shift energy and perspective.

2. The UNSMART action trap

Anti-pattern: Teams create action items that are vague, unmeasurable, or unrealistic (e.g., "improve communication" or "be more agile").

Why it happens: In the moment, broad aspirations feel meaningful, but they lack the specificity needed for execution.

Solution: Apply the SMART criteria to every action item: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-boxed. Instead of "improve communication," try "implement daily 15-minute team check-ins for the next two weeks."

3. The blame game

Anti-pattern: Retrospectives become cycles of finger-pointing and complaints without constructive problem-solving.

Why it happens: Teams lack psychological safety or facilitation skills to move from problems to solutions.

Solution: Establish "Vegas rules" (what's said in the room stays in the room) and focus on systems rather than individuals. Use techniques like "How might we..." questions to shift from blame to solution-oriented thinking.

4. The accountability vacuum

Anti-pattern: Action items are assigned to "everyone" or "the team," meaning no one feels personally responsible.

Why it happens: Teams want to avoid singling people out or assume collective ownership will naturally emerge.

Solution: Assign every action item to a specific person, even if execution involves the whole team. That person becomes the "champion" responsible for driving progress and reporting back.

5. The external focus trap

Anti-pattern: Teams spend most of their retrospective time discussing issues completely outside their control (other departments, management decisions, external dependencies).

Why it happens: External frustrations are often more emotionally charged and easier to discuss than internal team dynamics.

Solution: Use the "Circle of Influence" technique. Acknowledge external constraints briefly, then redirect focus to what the team can directly control and improve.

6. The documentation desert

Anti-pattern: No one takes notes or tracks what was discussed, leading to forgotten insights and repeated conversations.

Why it happens: Teams underestimate the value of retrospective outcomes or assume everyone will remember key points.

Solution: Designate a rotating note-taker and create a simple tracking system for action items. Include photos of boards or flip charts to capture visual elements.

7. The participation paradox

Anti-pattern: Some team members dominate discussions while others remain silent or disengaged.

Why it happens: Personality differences, power dynamics, or lack of structured facilitation create unequal speaking opportunities.

Solution: Use structured techniques like silent brainstorming, dot voting, or time-boxed speaking turns. Actively invite quieter members to share and ensure psychological safety for all voices.

A 5-step system for retros that lead to progress

Here’s the rhythm we’ve seen work across resilient, high-performing teams:

1. Prepare with purpose
   • Revisit action items from the previous retro - not just to tick them off, but to understand what’s changed since they were raised.
   • What moved forward? What didn’t? Why?
   • Clear out what’s stale. Highlight what’s still relevant. Identify patterns that deserve deeper discussion.
2. Focus the dialogue
   • Get beyond symptoms. Dig into root causes.
   • Use tools like “5 Whys” to sharpen your thinking.
   • Anchor the discussion on: What’s urgent and worth solving now?
3. Prioritize with intention
   • Don’t try to fix everything. Use an Impact/Effort Matrix to filter.
   • Choose 1–2 action items to commit to.
   • Assign owners. Define success. Agree on timelines.
4. Track where you work
   • Use a retrospective action tracker that lives inside your workflow.
   • In Easy Agile TeamRhythm, you can surface incomplete items, view their history, sort by relevance, and understand their context - all without switching tools.
5. Close the loop - every time
   • Review previous action items at the start of each retro.
   • Celebrate what’s done, even if it's small.
   • Reassess what to keep, modify, or drop.
6. Measure progress
   Start tracking your continuous improvement progress with simple, actionable metrics:Measuring these over time tells you whether you're improving how you improve.
   
   • ‍Action Item Completion Rate – % of action items completed before the next retro (target: 80–100%)‍
   • Recurring Issues Rate – How often the same topic resurfaces across retros‍
   • Average Age of Open Action Items – How long improvement tasks stay unresolved
   • ‍Retro Participation Rate – % of team actively contributing to retro inputs or votes

Stop repeating the same conversations

A team retrospective that works isn’t one that just uncovers issues - it’s one that resolves them. Building a habit of follow-through transforms retros from a passive meeting into a lever for real change.

If your retros feel like déjà vu, the problem might not be how you talk. It might be what happens after.

🎁 Get the full framework

We’ve distilled all these lessons and more into a practical, field-tested Retrospective Action Template. Inside, you’ll find:

• A step-by-step worksheet
• Guidance for assigning and tracking scrum action items
• Examples of achievable retrospective action items
• Built-in strategies for how to make a retrospective meaningful

👉 Download the free template here.

You’re already talking about what matters. Let’s make sure you act on it.

‍

Product development without an agile workflow would be like building a house without a blueprint or defined roles on the construction team. No one knows what to do or who does what. 🤔

The result: time and energy wasted building a single house that would most likely reveal its darkest flaws over the years.

So, here’s what you need to know: Process increases efficiency. It also increases efficacy, customer satisfaction, and a better experience for the team members who take a part in the process.

Follow this how-to guide to building and implementing an agile workflow in Jira. In this article, we’ll cover what an agile workflow is and define the steps for its creation and its principles in depth.

The notion of workflow

The execution of a team's work is dictated by one or more processes. In other words, a process is a way the team gets to the finish line with deliverables. And if you're developing products with an agile framework, an agile workflow is a way to structure that process.

Generally, a workflow is made out of:

• Activities, tasks, and steps
• Roles
• Work products
• A few other things to help improve team collaboration and work execution

With such a structure, it gets easier:

• To repeat the process
• For team members to work with each other
• To scale the process and the work itself

Breaking down tasks and milestones is the secret sauce that keeps agile projects running smoothly. Think of it as slicing a pizza: small, manageable pieces are far easier to handle and much more satisfying in the end.

Start by taking your big project goals and chunking them into bite-sized tasks. Each task should be small enough that the team knows exactly what needs to be done, but not so tiny that tracking them turns into busywork.

Next, set clear milestones that act as checkpoints along the way. Milestones aren’t just calendar dates—they’re meaningful accomplishments your team can rally around. This could be anything from getting a prototype out the door, to finalizing a core feature.

Here are some tips to help:

• Prioritize clarity: Make sure every task and milestone is easy to understand and leaves little room for ambiguity.
• Balance ambition with reality: Yes, everyone wants to move fast. But setting milestones that are just out of reach only leads to frustration. Aim for steady, sustainable progress.
• Keep dependencies visible: If Task B can’t start until Task A is finished, call it out. Tools like Trello or Asana make it easy to map these relationships.
• Minimize handoffs: Try to group tasks in ways that reduce waiting around for someone else to finish their part. This keeps things flowing and spirits high.
• Plan for improvement: If a milestone reveals a hiccup, be ready to revisit your task breakdown. Agile is about adapting—not sticking rigidly to the first plan.

Breaking tasks and milestones down this way helps your team stay organized, focus on delivering value, and adapt quickly if the winds shift—as they almost always do in any well-intentioned workflow.

Key phases of a typical project management workflow

Let’s break it down: while every team tweaks their approach, most project management workflows travel across four core stages—each playing a vital role in getting things over the finish line.

• Initiation: This is where the foundation gets laid. Teams hammer out the “what” and “why”—clarifying project goals, scoping out requirements, and rallying the first set of resources. Imagine drafting blueprints before even thinking about construction.
• Planning: Once the vision is in focus, it’s time to make things actionable. Here, teams split the work into tasks, divvy up responsibilities, schedule key milestones, and line up the resources needed. Think of this as laying out the job site so each crew knows what’s next.
• Execution: Now the work kicks off in earnest. Teams tackle tasks, stay aligned, and adjust on the fly as obstacles pop up. The plan meets real life, and the collaboration (with a good dose of coffee) begins.
• Monitoring and control: Nobody wants to end up with a lopsided house. This phase is all about tracking progress, reviewing what’s been done, and fine-tuning the plan as needed to hit targets—ensuring nothing important slips through the cracks.

Breaking the workflow into these phases helps teams stay organized and nimble, no matter what the project throws their way.

It seems like a workflow is so well-organized that teamwork would flow smoothly just because it exists. Well, that's not the case. In the next section, you'll learn that there's not a workflow for any team or project. Instead, there are one or more workflows that work for your team or your project.

Why there's no one-size-fits-all workflow

The size and maturity of teams have an impact on their workflows. Also, the type of project and both company culture and team culture influence the configuration of workflows. Bottom line: Your agile workflow will depend on many factors, and it’ll likely be unique.

You might, however, find online suggestions of workflows that prove to work with other companies. So, if you prefer, you might use those as a starting point for the definition of your own workflow. It might be the case that excluding some steps does the trick for you. On the other hand, you might define your own workflow from scratch.

Jira is a very versatile solution for workflow management that supports many different agile workflows.

With Jira, you may customize workflows to different company cultures or team cultures. In this context, culture means the way team members work with each other. In the same vein, a workflow expresses the dynamics of a team in one or more projects.

Now, if we're talking about Jira workflows, you should know what one of those contains.

What's a Jira workflow exactly?

A Jira workflow is an agile workflow built on top of and implemented with the help of Jira. It's a digital board that allows checking the statuses of work items. It may also send notifications when those items change status. You can also use your Jira board for Scrum meetings such as daily standups and sprint retrospectives.

You absolutely need to keep the statuses of ALL work items accurate. That means updating the status of each work item whenever and as soon as it changes.

Only an up-to-date agile workflow — and Jira board — fulfills its purpose and delivers benefit. It's an awesome tool for team members, Product Owners, and Scrum Masters to track work progress at all times.

How epics, user stories, versions, and sprints shape agile ways of working

So, what’s the secret sauce behind those smooth-running agile teams you keep hearing about? It’s all about breaking down work into manageable, meaningful pieces - enter the power squad: epics, user stories, versions, and sprints.

• Epics are the big-picture building blocks - the “what’s our destination?” moments. They capture large, complex features or goals, offering a zoomed-out lens for mapping progress over time. Think of an epic as your team’s long road trip.
• User stories are the smaller, more focused tasks that ladder up to those big goals. They translate what users want (“As a music lover, I want to save favorite playlists…”) into clear chunks for the team to tackle. Imagine them as the pit stops along your journey - each important, each achievable.
• Versions, sometimes called releases, offer natural breakpoints for delivering value. They help you organize and ship finished work to customers in batches, much like dropping off care packages at scheduled intervals.
• Sprints are the timeboxed working sessions, typically one to four weeks, where the team concentrates on a prioritized set of user stories. By the end of each sprint, there’s something tangible to show for the effort, keeping momentum and morale high.

In combination, these agile elements keep teams organized, focused, and flexible. They allow you to break daunting work into digestible steps while still adapting quickly to change. And when you’re using Jira, this framework ensures that everyone’s rowing in the same direction (with fewer bumps along the way).

Let's move on to our guide now. You'll find out, one tip at a time, how to become an agile workflow rockstar with the help of Jira.

Your guide for agile workflow in Jira

Start your engines! You're heading on a fabulous learning journey about the creation and management of agile workflows in Jira. Here are our best tips to make this process happen:

1. Start now

Don't postpone getting your hands dirty with workflow definition.

Even if you start simple, just get started. Don't delude yourself into thinking that you'll succeed at agile if you start big. In fact, that could work against you and your project.

2. Don't overwork

Don't spend weeks structuring, restructuring, and then restructuring your workflow some more.

Overworked workflows are hard to understand and much harder to implement and comply with. That would harm the basic principles of agile methodology.

With an overloaded workflow, you'd end with team members not knowing what to do and when to do it. Consequently, at the end of the sprint — or iteration — and project, no deliverables would be ready to roll out.

3. Don't forget about workflow stakeholders

You should account for roles that will somehow use the workflow you're defining. Whereas some will use it daily to get work done, others will use it only for some kind of management analysis.

You should understand with them what their workflow needs are. It'll take time, so you must be patient.

4. Understand the concept of ‘issue’ in Jira

In project management, an issue describes a problem for which there's no solution yet. Those issues come from risks to the project's development process and ultimate success. For instance, adding a functionality to the project scope — the issue — could come from the possibility of requirement changes — the risk.

However, in Jira, an issue doesn't necessarily represent a problem. Rather, it represents a piece of work that teams must complete. For instance, a Jira issue can be a task or a helpdesk ticket.

With software development, a Jira issue may symbolize more specific concepts such as:

• Product features and functionality that the development team must implement
• Bugs that must be solved

5. Know the pieces of the puzzle

In Jira, a workflow has four types of components:

1. Status. This indicates the position of an issue in the workflow. It can be an open — or unresolved — status or a closed — or resolved — status.
2. Transition. This defines how an issue changes status, and it can be either uni or bidirectional. You can create more or fewer constraints depending on how statuses change. You can even define that only certain people or certain roles can change an issue from one specific status to another.
3. Assignee. This is the person responsible for an issue.
4. Resolution. This describes why an issue went from open to closed statuses. Additionally, it should only stick to an issue while it’s resolved.

In software teams or projects, it's common to find statuses such as:

• "To Do" for issues yet to start
• "In Progress" for issues that the team already started to tackle
• "Code Review" for completed coding tasks that need a review
• "Quality Assurance" for completed issues that require testing by a team of testers
• "Done" for completed, reviewed, and tested work

When a code review is successful, the work is done. In this example, the code review's success is a transition from the status "Code Review" to the status "Done." And the resolution would be the reason why the code review failed.

Finally, you can set up transitions with:

• Conditions. They prevent an inadequate role from changing the status of an issue.
• Validators. These ensure a transition only occurs under certain circumstances. If not, the transition doesn't happen.
• Post functions. They describe actions on issues besides changing their status, and you can automate them. For instance, remove the resolution from a resolved issue before changing its status back to unresolved. Another example would be to remove the assignee from that issue.
• Properties. These are characteristics of transitions. For example, one characteristic could be to only show resolutions relevant to the type of issue.

6. Define ‘done’

Every team is unique. It’s made up of different people, different habits, and different experiences with technology and methods. Different ways of getting work done. This means you need to define what “work done” means to your team or your project.

For instance, you need to answer the following questions for your team or project:

• What status should a product or a feature have when it’s approved to launch or release?
• What should your team members do to get each work product to that status?
• Who should make decisions — such as approvals — along the way, which decisions, and at which points?
• Who declares work as done?

7. Customize Jira default workflow

Remember that you could use Jira to customize workflows to different ways of working as a team? Here’s how to do it:

Step #1: Define your workflow's statuses and transitions in Jira workflow designer.

You may go with Jira default Scrum or Kanban workflow — Jira classic templates — or make some changes to it. Alternatively, you may choose the Jira simplified Scrum workflow, which is adequate for reasonably basic requirements.

The simplified version of the Scrum workflow contains:

• Three statuses: "To Do", "In Progress", and "Done"
• Two transitions: from "To Do" to "In Progress" and from "In Progress" to "Done"
• Four columns to organize issues distributed across boards: "Backlog," "Selected for Development," "In Progress," and "Done"

Step #2: Build your workflow by adding components to the simplified Scrum workflow.

To track issue progress in agile development, you might add statuses such as "Code Review" and "Quality Assurance." And, you might add a validator to the transition from "Code Review" to "Done" to force that you need a successful code review to mark “Done.”

In addition, you might include approval stages in the workflow such as "Awaiting QA." These stages are prior to those in which an issue is closed or changes to a closed status.

Step #3: Nail the visual presentation of the diagram.

Once you finish tailoring the workflow to your team or project, make sure that the diagram is visually readable. That's essential when sharing the diagram with stakeholders for feedback. You should collect feedback from at least one representative of each kind of stakeholder.

An interesting feature of Jira is the workflow lets you give visual highlight of issues. This lets you see where the issue is in the workflow according to its status. Just open the issue and click on the "View Workflow" button next to the issue's status.

8. Rely on Jira reports for progress tracking

Jira provides two useful reports for tracking the team's work progress on a sprint:

• The Burndown Chart, which shows:
• The amount of work left to do in a sprint
• The work that team members are executing at the moment
• The distribution of work throughout the sprint
• Whether issues fit into the sprint and the effort estimation was adequate
  
• The Sprint Report, which includes:
• The Burndown Chart
• A list of open and closed issues for that sprint
• Extra work added to the sprint

As with any other report, Jira reports allow you to reason about success and failure. In this case, it's the success and failure of each sprint in terms of:

• Effort estimation
• Team performance
• Process irregularities
• Sprint planning

Most importantly, you can use Jira reports for the continuous improvement of those aspects and preventing problems such as:

• Too much work for a sprint
• Rushing work
• Sudden changes in priorities

A Jira workflow comes in handy when detecting outliers in the development process such as:

• A large number of open issues
• Frequent issue reopening
• A high number of unplanned issues added to the sprint

Being able to detect these problems is extremely valuable in that it helps avoid a massive sprint failure.

9. Share information

People at your company who aren't members of your team might need information from your workflow. So, take that into consideration when defining your team or project's workflow.

Those people might need to know about:

• The amount of completed work
• The product backlog dimension when compared to team performance
• The number of open and closed issues or the number of issues in a specific status
• The average issue completion time
• The average number of issues that take too long or experience bottlenecks, which means not moving forward at specific statuses such as "Quality Assurance"

10. Keep it simple

⚠️It can be tempting to create issue statuses while moving issues through the workflow, but don't do it! Each additional status adds more transitions and all their customized characteristics.

❌If your workflow already allows you to assess the sprint and feed your stakeholders with valuable information, that's just perfect. You don't need to add more issue statuses to it.

✔️Add extra issue statuses only when you have no other option. For instance, when different teams need to track work in different stages of development, you might need different statuses.

11. Limit work in progress

You may determine a specific limit to the number of issues in a specific status. When doing so, you should make sure all the team has enough work at each workflow status.

Plus, you should ensure that the limits you introduce into the workflow don't exceed the team's capacity. If you don't, the team will need to prioritize and you may not want that to happen.

Team performance should increase if you set the right work-in-progress limits. 🤗

12. Prepare to scale up

Agile teams should be small. Nevertheless, an agile workflow should cope with an increase in the number of people working with it. This means no one should notice if an increase takes place.

Here are some golden rules for scaling agile workflows:

• Agree on agile practices for workflow definition and minimize customization when multiple teams working on their own projects must collaborate.
• Different teams working on the same project should use the same workflow, or things could get messy.
• Teams should compromise when defining a common workflow. However, that's when teams build workflows based on multiple past successful experiences.

What else can you do?

Whenever you hear about workflows, it’s a sign that the work’s execution is being structured. It's also a sign of a long way ahead, but the outcome will be awesome if you:

• Follow the 12 rules above
• Choose a flexible issue tracker in terms of workflow customization, such as Jira
• Complement the issue tracker with the right apps

Don't force your team or project to comply with a tool. 😨 Rather, do the exact opposite! Choose the tool that allows you to build and implement the right workflow for your context.

That will increase throughput and workflow compliance levels, which is exactly what you want when creating a workflow.

Keep your agile approach strong — streamline, discuss, and iterate. These are the keywords for building and implementing an agile workflow, so don't forget them for a single second! As a result, you'll avoid:

• Complicating the workflow when it's not absolutely necessary
• Disregarding the pains of stakeholders and team members have when using or viewing the workflow
• Having an outdated workflow that's no longer adequate for both the company culture and the team culture

Kick your agile workflow up a notch

Easy Agile TeamRhythm helps you build and implement a Scrum workflow in Jira. Optimize your agile workflow by:

• Visualizing what the team will deliver and when by arranging user stories into sprint swimlanes
• Prioritizing user stories in each sprint by ordering them inside the respective sprint swimlane
• Reviewing sprint statistics at a glance to ensure that the team's capacity isn't exceeded
• Registering effort estimation in user stories.