DevOps vs. Agile: Differences and Common Ground

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

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.

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.

As an agile team, you’re likely well aware of Jira software and its supreme capabilities for creating agile workflows. Jira workflows are a staple for development teams (ours included! 🕺), and there’s no question why.

Jira takes a customer-first approach to design projects, and it’s highly customizable, making it extremely popular among agile teams working in software development. As the folks who developed Jira at Atlassian like to say, “The more agile your team is, the more Jira will be able to help.”

Our team has been using Jira workflows for years, and we’ve learned a thing or two along the way. Okay, we’ve learned a lot along the way. 😎

We’ve also dedicated our company to making products that work directly with the Jira software you use. While you probably already know how to use Jira workflows, you may not be getting the most out of them. In this post, we’ll share seven best practices for getting the absolute most out of your workflows.

Free workflow apps

Try our FREE Jira workflow apps available on the Atlassian Marketplace!

Easy Agile Scrum Workflow for Jira

Easy Agile Kanban Workflow for Jira

Why dev teams choose Jira workflows

Unlike traditional project management tools, Jira takes an agile approach to product development. Jira Software is a family of software platforms designed to help agile teams do what they do even better, so team members can plan, track, and release great software every time.

The Jira server allows for multiple frameworks, including both Scrum and Kanban processes, making it completely versatile, no matter what style you’re used to. It helps you manage all phases of your workflow with complete visibility, and you can continually improve your performance based on detailed real-time data.

🙋🏼 If you’re new to Jira, follow this how-to tutorial from Atlassian for developers joining an existing Jira cloud project.

Jira workflow best practices and lessons learned

We love its flexibility and how it helps development teams work to meet stakeholder and customer needs. Our two CEOs worked directly with the Atlassian Jira team for five years, where they got to know the product inside and out.

1. Make customer-focused decisions

Every decision you make should be customer-focused. Repeat that again and again — you can even record it on your phone and listen to it while you sleep every night! Agile methodologies are especially effective because they focus on this priority in every problem.

Keep this mantra top of mind through every step of your Jira project, such as when you add workflows, create new workflows, define specific issue fields, or resolve issue types. To continually bring value to the customer, you need to visualize their journey from start to finish.

User story maps are invaluable tools for keeping customers at the forefront of everything you do. They help teams prioritize based on customer needs, and they give a clear view of the customer journey. It’s their story, after all, so why not view your backlog from their perspective?

Easy Agile TeamRhythm transforms flat backlogs into impactful, visual representations of the customer journey. The app integrates seamlessly with your agile boards in Jira and is designed to help teams provide value to customers quickly and frequently.

2. Use personas to gain a deeper understanding of your audience

Personas are the ultimate tool for empathizing with customers. They ask important questions about users so development teams can gain a deep understanding of the people who will use the product they’re working on. If you aren’t using personas yet, move it to the top of your to-do list.

A persona asks important questions of the user to capture buying habits, pain points, behavioral patterns, demographics, and more. Using these directly with your user story maps or alongside your product roadmap will help you make the decisions that will bring the most value to the customer.

Easy Agile Personas for Jira configures directly with your current Jira projects. The app has the functionality to create and store customer personas natively in Jira software, so you can prioritize customer needs every step of the way.

3. Create a workflow for your team, not everyone else

Some teams create a one-size-fits-all workflow and duplicate it across issue types with only small changes on the way. Depending on the team, that might not work. A status and transition that works for one issue type, for example, might not work for another. Some issues may require specific statuses and transitions, or even restrictions and automations that only work for them. You can mold a template, but it’ll never be the most effective workflow for your team.

Still, the one-size-fits-all approach is tempting. It’s easier too. But ultimately, the people on your team will end up working with a tool not made for them, but for someone else. Remember, as an admin your job is to serve the people on your team. You want your team to work with joy and harmony. You want your workflows to be effective for the people working in them, not easy to create for the admin. Putting in the effort now will have a scaling effect, given that the people on your team have to work in Jira every day.

If not one-size-fits-all then, what do we recommend?

Start from scratch. Start from zero, from nothing. Clear your mind of all templates that exist and do the work of talking to your team. Figure out the steps your team goes through and translate them into Jira. Talk to a representative from each role on your team, and make sure their needs are met. The best workflow is the one that’s tailored to your team, not for everyone else. It’s not easy and it’s going to take time, but your teams will thank you for it.

4. Don’t add more detail than what’s needed

When working in Jira, there’s such a thing as too much detail. Although it can be tempting to include absolutely everything, this may not actually be the best move.

Overuse of custom fields can lead to a slower response time on Jira issues, and it may cause frustrating holdups. Don’t get in your own way by creating an overly complicated structure. Whenever adding to your Jira workflow, think back to your customer needs and OKRs. Simple is often the more effective choice.

5. Don’t over-customize or overcomplicate

Custom workflows offer dev teams a solution that can be adapted to meet their current needs. But customization can come at a price.

As your Jira workflows evolve, they will become more and more unrecognizable from one workflow to the next. In some cases, they may get to the point of becoming a completely different species that will have trouble working with original versions.

Add custom fields when you need to, but don’t overdo it on complex workflows. Set standard practices across your team for how and when different workflows are customized to minimize compatibility issues. Ensure that customization is approved by those who understand OKRs and have the entire big picture in mind. It may be prudent for larger teams to limit admin assignee access to prevent unnecessary and possibly harmful customizations.

6. Keep your workflow simple: limit statuses and transitions

Adding a status for every part of your team’s process may seem like a good idea, and Jira definitely supports it. But keep in mind that every status and transition adds more complexity for the team working in the workflow. If you want to move fast, keep your process lean.

After mapping how your team works, include only the statuses and transitions you need. A workflow with too many statuses and transitions can be confusing to understand. Remember that the team working in the workflow will have to understand and use it.

7. Iterate on your workflow

It’s great to plan out your workflow, but don’t worry about getting the perfect workflow on the first try. Teams change, and Jira can adapt to those changes. What’s important is creating the best workflow you can now and iterating based on changes and feedback from the team.

This may seem counterintuitive, especially if your team isn’t used to working agile and wants to set and forget the workflows. Keep in mind that Jira workflows are here to serve your team’s needs at the current time. They’re here to adapt to your needs right now. As you evolve, your workflows evolve with you.

8. Involve stakeholders when creating workflows

These include both internal and external stakeholders in the process to ensure their needs are consistently met. The product manager is just one person with one viewpoint — you need a variety of team perspectives.

Stakeholders need to be involved, and they need to have continual access to essential documents, such as your product roadmap or user story map. These living documents are a work in progress. They represent the overall vision at any given time, and since they’re always evolving, your stakeholders need to know how to access them and how to decipher them.

When admins don’t involve the team in creating workflows, the workflow may not be the best one for the team. Remember that when you’re building a workflow, you’re doing it for people. These people will be working with the workflow you build, so make it work for them.

To create effective workflows, involve a stakeholder from each role within your multidisciplinary team. Here are some key roles to consider:

• Product Manager: Understands the overall vision and roadmap.
• Software Engineer: Knows the technical intricacies and feasibility.
• Product Designer: Focuses on user experience and interface design.
• Content Designer: Ensures that content is clear and effective.
• Quality Assurance Engineer: Guarantees the product meets quality standards.

Get a representative from each of these roles, find out how they work, and once you’ve created your workflows, check that they’re happy with them. If you don’t, you might end up with statuses and transitions that people don’t use, and you might miss important workflow rules that can speed your team up.

Then take your team’s feedback and iterate. They’re the ones who are working in Jira.

9. Teach stakeholders about the iterative process

When it comes to agile and working in Jira, everything is iterative. The plan you set out with is bound to change with the needs of your customers.

This is really difficult for some stakeholders to understand, especially if they’re not used to working with agile. The ideas and methodologies that come naturally to you may be completely foreign to the stakeholders and key customers you involve in the process.

Take it slow and BE PATIENT. Teach stakeholders about the agile process, and ensure they understand that any plan is completely subject to change. Plans are “living documents” that represent what the team hopes to accomplish based on what will provide the most value to customers in that snapshot of time.

10. Test your workflow

If you don’t test enough, you’ll have a workflow with so many errors they’re hard to fix. If you test too much too early, you won’t be able to move quickly. Testing is a balancing act. There are no hard rules, but there are two stages where people usually test their workflows:

Stage 1 - Testing the new workflow in a separate project or instance

Before you get your team to use your workflow, you want to check that everything works properly. To do so you can copy your workflow to:

• A separate Jira project
• A separate Jira site, if you have one

Either way, you want a place in Jira that doesn’t impact people in the project for testing. There you can create sample issues and manually run through every step of the workflow. You can check for things like:

• Whether the statuses and transitions make sense
• If the issue ever gets stuck at particular steps in the workflows
• Whether workflow rules are working properly
• How a representative from each role in your team goes through the workflow

Stage 2 - Testing with your team in your actual project

Testing is a continuous process.

After getting your workflow into Jira, there are bound to be problems your team runs into that you didn’t consider. That’s why it’s important to get feedback from the people actually using the workflow.

It’s not something you have to do every day, or even every week, but keep in touch with your team every now and then. If you have meetings about the tools you use or about how you work, make sure to talk about how the workflows are working for them.

11. Make use of agile Jira apps

Jira is a fantastic platform with tons of features and development tools for agile teams that we can’t praise highly enough, but it doesn’t come with everything. Take advantage of plugins designed to help teams just like yours. The Atlassian marketplace offers a number of Jira apps that provide specific solutions, including Easy Agile’s four Jira plugins:

• Easy Agile TeamRhythm
• Easy Agile Programs
• Easy Agile Roadmaps
• Easy Agile Personas

Each of our plugins seamlessly integrates with Jira to simplify your development and streamline your business process.

Marketplace

Try any of our apps free for 30 days — we’re sure you’ll love them. If you have questions, contact our team or watch the demos on each product page to learn more.

We’re here to talk about agile, and we don’t mean your abilities on a sports field or in a yoga studio. If you’re new to agile as a methodology, there’s a lot to learn, but the basics are simple. Agile 101 begins with understanding that agile can be applied to anything. You can use agile practices to improve your personal task management, optimize workplace efficiency, or align software teams around product development.

No matter the application, the concepts remain the same: Agile creates a continuous improvement mindset that values flexibility, adaptability, collaboration, and efficiency.

In this post, we’ll cover agile 101 basics, the benefits of agile, popular agile methodologies, and common mistakes to avoid.

Agile 101: How it compares to traditional project management

The concept of Agile has evolved, but it really took off and became popularized in software development. In recent years, the methods and guiding principles of Agile have expanded into a variety of industries that want to emphasize continuous improvement and growth.

How does agile compare to traditional project management? In short: It doesn’t. Agile is just the opposite. One of our favorite ways to compare the agile approach to classical project management is to think of them as jazz vs. classical music.

In classical music, a conductor brings a previously composed and organized piece of music to an orchestra. Then, they dictate what happens and when. This is very much the same as traditional project management, where the project manager brings a plan they have conceived on their own to their team and then proceeds to tell the team how to carry it out. The project manager lays out the steps and expects the team to follow them to the letter (or note). 🎼

Jazz, on the other hand, is collaborative. Each band member feeds off of the other, creating music in a flexible and iterative process — just like the agile process. The band, like an agile team, experiments together and freely creates music in the moment. Each iteration is a little bit different, and hopefully better, than the one that preceded it. 🎷

Project management doesn’t allow for this kind of flexibility. It relies on following a strict sequential order. Each project element must be completed before moving on to the next. Just like a waterfall, the flow of work remains the same from project to project.

Agile is non-linear. It focuses on flexibility, collaboration between team members, and delivering consistent value to stakeholders. With each iteration comes new, actionable insights into what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change. It’s a multidimensional way of working that removes the bottlenecks inherent in traditional project management.

Agile 101: The benefits of agile

There are many benefits to agile practices for software development projects, as well as many other industries. The general concepts of agile can be applied to all sorts of situations, and its versatility means it will evolve with the needs of your team.

Think of it as a methodology you can apply to any of your business processes for increased collaboration, optimized efficiency, and continuous improvement.

Agile helps teams and businesses:

• Work at optimal efficiency by eliminating waste
• Make more effective decisions
• Adjust as new information comes in or is discovered
• Continually meet stakeholder deliverable deadlines
• Focus on adding value for stakeholders and customers
• Understand the customer journey
• Build superior products
• Understand capacity to ensure no one over or under commits to work
• Identify roadblocks before they occur
• Spot bottlenecks that could delay work
• Collaborate and work better together
• Adapt with technological, economic, and cultural changes
• Prepare for the unexpected
• Establish processes tailored to your needs
• Improve morale and happiness
• Develop a continuous improvement mindset

Agile 101: Popular methodologies

Now that you have a better understanding of agile 101 basics and the benefits of agile, let’s discuss some of the most popular agile methodologies.

Scrum

Scrum is extremely popular in agile software development. It’s a fairly complicated process for those who are unfamiliar with it, but the basics revolve around recurring sprints that each focus on completing a set amount of work.

A Scrum is one sprint lasting 2-4 weeks. At the beginning of the sprint, the product owner decides which task will move from the main list (product backlog) to the sprint to-do list (sprint backlog). The development team, led by a Scrum Master who understands the Scrum process, works to complete the sprint backlog in the allocated time.

The Scrum team meets for daily Scrums or stand-ups that ensure everyone is on the page about possible roadblocks and what work is to be completed next. This process repeats until a product is complete or stakeholders are fully satisfied. At the end of the sprint, a retrospective is held to help the team understand what went well and what they can improve upon.

Kanban

Kanban is a fairly simple agile process that is often partially utilized within other agile methods, such as Scrum. It’s a task management tool designed to optimize efficiency by visualizing all of the required work and limiting works in progress. A Kanban workflow visually organizes tasks on Kanban boards so that work items can move forward smoothly, even as changes and adjustments are made along the way.

In its simplest form, a Kanban board is three columns (To-Do, Doing, and Done) that allow work to freely flow from one phase to the next. Trello is an example of an online Kanban board.

Kanban boards should be placed in an area of the office that’s visible to the entire team. For virtual teams, this may look like an online resource that everyone can access. This helps everyone from the top down get on the same page about action items. If anyone is wondering what’s the most important task of the day, they simply need to check the Kanban board.

Lean

Lean, along with the five lean principles, originally created by Toyota, is a guiding mindset that helps teams work more productively, efficiently, and effectively. It can be applied to various agile and software development methodologies.

Lean software development is all about improving efficiency by eliminating waste, such as reducing tasks and activities that don’t add value. It provides a clear way to scale agile practices across large or growing organizations.

Extreme programming

Extreme programming (XP) is an agile approach centered around improving software quality and responsiveness while evolving with customer requirements. The ultimate goal of extreme programming is producing high-quality results throughout every aspect of the work, not just the final product.

XP decision-making is based on five values: communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, and respect. XP’s specifics won’t apply to all situations, but the general framework can provide value to any team.

Agile 101: Best practices and mistakes to avoid

To get you started, here are our list of best practices and common agile mistakes.

Basic agile 101 best practices:

✅ See failures as a learning opportunity.

✅ Embrace change and improve your adaptability skills.

✅ Improve efficiency by eliminating tasks and activities that don’t provide value.

✅ Continually improve upon your processes.

✅ Allow plans to live, breathe, and adapt.

✅ Use retrospectives to listen, learn, and improve.

✅ Prioritize the customer journey, and make decisions based on customer needs.

✅ Utilize agile tools and resources.

Common agile mistakes:

❌ Not adapting as new information is revealed or obtained.

❌ Not being on the same page as stakeholders.

❌ Not trusting the team to ideate and develop without supervision.

❌ Sitting down for sprint planning without enough information.

❌ Not incorporating retrospective insights in the following planning session.

❌ Skipping a retrospective due to lack of time or resources.

❌ Too much testing, or not knowing when the project is actually “done.”

❌ Choosing tools that don’t take a customer-centric approach.

Agile made easy

Whether you apply agile principles to an agile task management system like a personal Kanban board or use agile to develop working software, the essence is the same. In basic terms, agile is about continuous improvement. It’s a methodology, mindset, and way of viewing the world. Agile is flexible, adaptive, collaborative, and value-driven.

Easy Agile helps teams work better with agile. We design agile apps for Jira with simple, collaborative, and flexible functionality. From team agility with Easy Agile TeamRhythm, to scaled agility with Easy Agile Programs, our apps can help your agile teams work better together, and deliver for your customers.

Book a 1:1 demo to learn more about our suite of Jira tools, or contact our team if you have additional questions. We offer a free, 30-day trial, so you can try out our products before making a commitment.