Jira Software Essentials

Patrick Li

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788836081
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Computer Science

Explore Jira Software to manage your projects proficiently

Key Features

• Plan and manage projects effortlessly with Jira Software by integrating it with other applications
• Improve your team's performance with Scrum and Kanban, together with agile methodology
• Easy-to-follow learning guide to install Jira Software and understand how it fits in with Atlassian Jira

Book Description

Jira Software is an agile project management tool that supports any agile methodology, be it scrum, Kanban, or your own unique flavour. From agile boards to reports, you can plan, track, and manage all your agile software development projects from a single tool. Jira Software brings the power of agile methodology to Atlassian Jira.

This second edition of JIRA Agile Essentials, will help you dive straight into the action, exploring critical agile terminologies and concepts in the context of Jira Software. You will learn how to plan, track, and release great software. This book will teach you how to install and run Jira Software and set it up to run with Scrum and Kanban. It will also teach you to use Jira Software your way and run projects beyond the out-of-box Scrum and Kanban way, including a hybrid approach of both the methodologies and other options that come with Jira Software. Later, you will learn how to integrate it with the tools you are already using and enhance Jira with add-ons such as Confluence. You will learn to stay connected with your team from anywhere to ensure great development. Jira Software has numerous deployment options in the cloud, on your own infrastructure, or at a massive scale. You will be introduced to Bitbucket, Atlassian's distributed version control system, which integrates seamlessly with Jira, allowing your team to work within the two applications as one harmonious environment.

With this practical guide, you will develop a great working knowledge of Jira Software and your project management will become much more efficient.

What you will learn

• Understand the basics and agile methodologies of Jira software
• Use Jira Software in a Scrum environment
• Manage and run Jira Software projects beyond the out of box Scrum and Kanban way
• Combine Scrum and Kanban and use other project management options beyond just agile
• Customize Jira Software's various features and options as per your requirements
• Work with Jira Agile offline, and plan and forecast projects with agile portfolio
• Integrate Jira Agile with Confluence and Bitbucket

Who this book is for

If you want to get started with Jira Software and learn how to run your Jira projects the agile way, then this is the perfect book for you. You will need to be familiar with the basics of Jira, both from an end user's and an administrator's perspective. Experience with workflows, custom fields, and other administrative functions of Jira will be useful.

Jira Software – Advanced

In the previous chapters, we looked at how to use Jira to run and manage projects with both Scrum and Kanban, as well as customizing Jira itself to be more flexible and adaptable to your needs. In this chapter, we will look into some of the additional capabilities of Jira, as well as integrating with other systems to provide a complete end-to-end experience for you and your team.

By the end of the chapter, you will have learned how to:

• Display and share project information with the dashboard
• Create and link epics to requirement pages
• Create user stories from requirement pages
• Display sprints on calendars
• Capture sprint meeting notes
• Share reports on project progress
• Print out your agile cards and pin them onto a physical board

Displaying agile reports

As we saw in Chapter 2, Jira Software for Scrum and Chapter 3, Jira Software for Kanban, Jira comes with a number of reports that you can generate to get a better understanding of how your project is tracking. However, they often require you to go to your board and then generate the report manually. A better way to display and share information on your project is to take advantage of some of Jira's built-in collaboration features.

Using the Jira dashboard

The easiest way to display and share your project and sprint progress with everyone is to use the dashboard feature from Jira. A dashboard acts as a portal page for your project, and you can display different information about your project by adding gadgets onto the dashboard.

Jira comes with a number of gadgets that are designed specifically to display agile related information, including:

• Sprint burndown gadget: This displays a burndown chart of your sprint on the dashboard. The chart will be automatically updated to reflect the current data.
• Days remaining in sprint gadget: This displays how many days are left before the sprint is scheduled to be completed. It acts as a reminder for how much time is left on the clock.
• Sprint health gadget: This displays a bar chart showing information on how the sprint is progressing; for example, how much more work is still left to do.

The power of using the Jira dashboard is that you are not limited to using only the gadgets that are specifically designed for Agile. Jira comes with many other useful gadgets that you can use to drill down into your project and sprint. They are as follows:

• Filter results gadget: You can select a filter and display the result in a table. You can use this to display the most important issues in the sprint.
• Two-dimensional filter statistics gadget: This is similar to the filter results gadget, but instead of displaying a list of issues, it will display a statistical breakdown of the filter result based on the fields you choose.
• Pie chart gadget: You can select a filter and the result will be displayed as a pie chart, where each slice is based on a field of your choice; for example, priority.

As you can see, you can build a very useful dashboard by combining gadgets from both agile and non-agile based ones. You can even create your own gadget or download gadgets from third-party vendors to display information specific to your needs.

To create a dashboard for your project and sprint, perform the following steps:

1. Select the Manage Dashboards option from the Dashboards menu.
2. Click on the Create new dashboard button.
3. Enter a name for your new dashboard.

4. Select how you want to share the dashboard. Dashboards are private by default, so for others to see the dashboard, you must share the dashboard with them. As shown in the following screenshot, we are sharing the dashboard with members of the Top Secret Project.
5. Click on the Add button to create the dashboard:

Make sure you click the Add button after you have selected who to share the dashboard with.

Once you have created a new dashboard, you can start adding contents onto it with gadgets:

1. Click on the Add a new gadget link. It does not matter which one you click, as you can always reposition the gadgets after they have been added, by simply dragging them around on the dashboard.
2. Select the gadgets you want to add from the Add a gadget dialog by clicking on its Add gadget button.
3. Close the dialog once you have added all the gadgets you want:

Once you have added the gadgets, you will need to configure each gadget to display the data you want. For most gadgets, all you need to do is select the board, sprint, project, or filter to use:

You can also configure the ...