The State of Atlassian Report by Adaptivist (a summary)

Scrum isn't the only agile software development methodology out there. 😲 If you're not familiar with Kanban, we promise we’re not going rogue — Kanban is agile. And, Jira project management tools make organizing a Kanban team really simple.

Kanban originates from Lean principles and focuses on eliminating waste and evaluating processes throughout the entire project lifecycle rather than just at the end. The key fundamentals of Lean are purpose, process, and people. Sounds pretty agile, doesn't it?

Jira project management tools help you get off to a great start with Kanban. You can use the default Jira boards or go crazy with customizations. It’s up to you and your team.

If you're not sure whether Kanban or Scrum is right for your company, keep reading. We'll give you some information to help you decide. We'll also share some tips on how to use Jira project management tools to keep your work organized and your team productive.

Which is best: Scrum or Kanban?

Both. Or, neither. Scrum and Kanban are both effective methodologies for developing software. Which is best for your organization is a better way to ask the question. The answer depends on the kind of work or project types assigned to your team.

Scrum is generally recommended when:

• Your project is relatively stable, meaning you can go a few weeks without a major change in requirements, features, or general product direction.
• The majority of your team's work items are complex features or significant product updates rather than small tweaks, bug fixes, or reactionary work from external feedback.
• You can plan your work a few weeks in advance, generally without significant changes in scope or requirements.
• You have a cross-functional team, willing and able to tackle work as a team rather than individually.

If the following sounds more like your software development team, you should consider Kanban:

• Your work is dynamic with frequent changes in priority.
• You're normally working on small updates, bug fixes, or responding to customer demands.
• Your team resources are shared across multiple projects or products.
• Most of your team members work independently because you generally don't need to collaborate.

Finally, you should consider Waterfall 😲 if:

• Your work is predictable or repetitious (annual updates or regularly scheduled upgrades).
• You're 100% familiar with the work, the technology, and the desired outcome.
• There's little chance of scope or requirement changes.
• There is an absolute path from start to finish required by legal or regulatory compliance standards.

Look, we love agile as much as anyone. But we don't let our passion for Scrum and Kanban get in the way of creating the best possible work environment for our teams. The best software methodology and process is the one that best suits your team.

How to get started with a Kanban project in Jira

Atlassian created a great platform to help Jira users manage Kanban teams. Step 1 is choosing the Kanban template when you create your new project. Easy peasy. 🤓

Next, you'll want to set up your Kanban workflow. Jira creates a default workflow for you: Backlog, Selected for Development, In Progress, and Done. The default works great for a lot of teams, but if you want to customize it, click the dot menu in the upper right corner and click “Board Settings.”

The board settings let you go nuts customizing:

• Columns and quick filters
• Swimlanes and card colors
• Card and issue detail views
• Prioritization ranks
• Working days
• Integrating the board with a roadmap.

One of the goals of Kanban is to help isolate areas in your process in real-time that are slowing down the delivery of work. Keep this in mind as you think about each step in your process and decide which steps need a column in the workflow.

To keep from having 20 columns on your board, consider combining related steps or grouping sequential steps that typically happen very quickly.

Let’s talk about WIP limits

Now that you have built your Kanban board, it’s time to set WIP limits. (That's work-in-progress for the novices.) WIP limits restrict you from overloading a stage in the workflow with too much work.

Let's talk about the purpose of a WIP limit. WIP limits help your team stay focused on a single task at a time so they can complete it, deploy it, and move on to the next task.

A lot of items in progress tend to distract people. They work on one task for a little while, then switch to another task, finishing neither and deploying nothing. 😕 That's called context-switching, and it'll suck the life out of your productivity.

WIP limits also show you bottlenecks in your process. Depending on your workflow, you may see work stacking up in In Progress for a particular team member but nothing is moving to Done. You need to figure out why.

If your workflow is more specific, you may see a work overload for the database team while nothing is In Progress for your front-end developer.

WIP limits won’t solve these problems, but they do let you know when you have a problem so you can dig in and figure out a solution.

Tips for using card colors and swimlanes

Agile project management for a Kanban team is all about keeping the team productive without getting in their way, reporting on overall status, anticipating issues, and problem-solving. Card colors and swimlanes give project managers at-a-glance insight into key team metrics.

Card colors and swimlanes represent specific issue attributes or they can represent query results or assignees. We like to think of the card colors as more detailed issue-tracking data, while swimlanes give us a higher-level picture of the whole body of work.

Regardless of how you like to organize your work, consider the flexibility with assigning queries to your swimlanes or card colors. Following are some ideas to query by:

• Type of work: UX, design, front-end, database, etc.
• Label: Create team- or project-specific labels.
• Components: Divide your project into sections and assign each section a component.
• Effort and time-tracking: Anticipate throughput by at-a-glance efforts by work item.
• Business value or reporter: Get organized by stakeholder or business unit.
• Custom fields: View user segment or another custom field that is meaningful to your company.

Kanban and Jira boards can support various project management processes, from project plan to workflow management to stakeholder communications. You just have to explore what's available and get creative with your Jira customizations.

Get organized with Jira project management tools

Regardless of your agile methodology preference, effective project organization and oversight are almost impossible without some kind of project management software. But let's be honest — the last thing your team or organization needs is another tool.

Your software developers love using Jira software. 🤟 You can configure Jira workflows and customizations to meet even the pickiest project management needs with just a little effort. You'll save time and the hassle of integrating an external product or worse - manually pulling project data together for your reporting and stakeholder communications.

The Atlassian Marketplace is a great source to find add-ons for even more functionality to handle your task management and project team needs. Easy Agile created two apps specifically to help project managers: Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Easy Agile Programs.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm helps scrum and kanban teams plan and manage their work with the context that a user story map format provides. Team retrospective functionality helps your team focus on continuous improvement.

View team swimlanes, track cross-team dependencies, and keep your focus at the program level with Epic- and Feature-only views with our Programs app.

Whether you're supporting a Kanban or Scrum team, building roadmaps, version planning, and planning program increments in Jira just got easier!

Sprints are at the core of agile principles. And they’re how a Scrum team uses a predefined time period to work together towards an agreed-upon goal. A sprint focuses on interaction and collaboration to produce working software. A team has to do a lot of work to maintain their sprint workflows in Jira. Changing task statuses, notifying teammates to sprint changes, and keeping developers’ code changes in sync with Jira tasks can all add up to a lot of manual mouse clicks. 🖱

Many of these manual steps can be automated to save your team effort.

Help your Scrum team with Jira automations

Scrum is a framework for getting agile work done. The Scrum events are:

• Sprint: The time period in which the team works toward their sprint goal (e.g., completing a set amount of user stories from the product backlog). The next sprint starts when the previous one ends.
• Sprint Planning Meeting: A meeting that scopes the amount of effort required for backlog items prioritized by the product owner. The software development team commits to completing that amount of work.
• Daily Scrum: A brief meeting each workday when Scrum team members update each other on the progress of their work within the sprint. It's a time to lend support or unblock another team member who may be stuck on an issue.
• ​Sprint Review: A time for the Scrum team and stakeholders to review the outcomes of the completed sprint and discuss what impacts they have on future sprints.
• Sprint Retrospective: A meeting to find opportunities to improve on the team's agile processes and its interactions with each other.

Which Scrum roles are involved:

• Software Developers: They get the work done but don't want any sprint surprises.
• Product Owner: This person prioritizes the work and sometimes has to make unplanned mid-sprint changes.

Every player on the software development team, from startups to established companies, has repetitive tasks they need to perform throughout its sprint events. Because we're all human, when we're sprinting, we sometimes forget to transition the status of issues or do the little things in Jira that keep everyone on the team aware of what's happening in our sprint in real-time.

Automate your sprint workflows with Jira

Have no fear. Jira can help automate typical sprint workflows like task transitions and team notifications. 🤯 Agile project management within software development is a methodology that is conducive to automation. You can link behaviors in your Jira issues to trigger actions from tools like Slack and MS Teams, email, GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab.

You can use Jira automations to do things such as:

• Notify team members and stakeholders of any changes to a sprint
• Trigger actions based on task transitions within a sprint iteration
• Keep Jira task and sub-task statuses and story points in sync
• Connect code commits and build statues to Jira issues

Oh my!

If you didn't know these tools existed, here's your chance to learn them.

Automate your way to connectivity

Keep agile teammates in the know

When a sprint begins, it's important the product owner notifies team members if something changes. That way, you can make sure it won't negatively impact your ability to complete your sprint goal.

Communication within agile teams is paramount, and Jira provides ways to automatically notify your scrum team based on rules you set about your sprint. For example, you can send emails or Slack notifications when the status of a task changes.

Task and sub-task coordination

Sub-tasks are a handy feature in Jira. They help you break tasks into smaller steps and track their progress as they're being worked on. Scrum masters encourage this universally in agile, but it can be easy for sub-tasks to get out of sync with their parent tasks. We’ll soon learn a Jira automation to prevent this.

Connect developer code work to Jira issues

Your development team has a lot on its plate during a sprint. Not only does it have to complete all of its user stories — but there's also the mechanics of keeping code commits by developers synced with their associated Jira tickets. And, always remembering to keep these in tune with Jira tickets is burdensome. As you’ll see, there are ways to connect actions taken in GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab and update Jira tickets.

Jira automations FTW

Here are our nine favorite Jira automations that streamline our sprint workflow.

1. Notify teammates when a story is added to a sprint

Scope creep (adding new points to a sprint after it starts) is nobody's friend. However, there are times when a product owner needs to pull an item from the product backlog and add it to the current sprint. When this happens, it's best practice to inform the whole team that a change has been made. Use this handy automation template to send an email to your team when backlog items are added to a sprint.

2. Automatically assign a task when its status changes

Some team members need to be made aware when an issue transitions to being on their plate. When an issue’s status switches to In Review, for example, you can auto-assign it to a QA teammate.

3. Celebrate when your sprint is over by sending a Slack message

A lot of work happens during a sprint. Because your next sprint always begins immediately when the current one ends, it's often difficult to find time to celebrate wins. Use this celebration to send a fun Slack message to your team when the final issue in the sprint is completed. You can make sprints fun with automation!

4. Automatically put In Progress issues into the current sprint

There are lots of moving parts when trying to ensure that In Progress Jira issues are visible in the current sprint. Nobody wants hidden work. When a developer moves a task into In Progress, you can automatically assign it to the current sprint.

5. Sum the story points of sub-tasks and update the value of the parent task

Be sure that your story point totals are accurate by automatically summing the points of your sub-tasks and updating the parent task with the value. They'll never be out of sync with each other with this nifty automation rule.

6. Close an issue when all of its sub-tasks are complete

Some people like to work with sub-tasks, which is great. But it's easy to overlook closing a parent task after you've finished your work and closed all of its sub-tasks. Well … you can automatically close a parent task when all of its sub-tasks are complete so this doesn't happen. 🤖

7. Move a task to In Progress when a commit is made

Save your developers time by cutting down on redundant tasks. When a code commit is made, it means a task is being worked on. Connect Jira to your commit repository (GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab) so that when a code commit is made, the associated Jira issue moves to In Progress.

8. Add a comment to a ticket when a pull request is made

Adding details to a Jira ticket from a pull request can be a copy-and-paste job — but it doesn't have to be. Use a trigger to add the details from the request into a Jira comment.

9. Notify the development team when a Jenkins build fails

Certain issues can't wait to be realized by the whole team on the next daily stand-up. If your Jenkins build fails, this is an awesome way to let the whole team know by Slack, MS Teams, or email ... right away.

Make agile sprints easy

Automations in Jira make a sprint team’s life easier by cutting down on the manual work needed to keep the mechanics of a sprint running.

You can use modified versions of these automations with Easy Agile to make agile even easier! For example, celebrate roadmap wins by notifying your team when issues are completed in your Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira, or sync your Jira data fields with your roadmap. There are many ways to mix-and-match rules and triggers to make Jira automations work for you.

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.