Introduction to Jira

Overview of Jira
Jira is a suite of agile work management solutions that powers
collaboration across all teams from concept to customer, empowering
you to do the best work of your life, together. Jira offers several
products and deployment options that are purpose-built for Software,
IT, Business, Ops teams, and more. Read on to see which is right for
you.

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
Jira for project management teams

Jira Software provides planning and roadmap tools so teams can manage stakeholders, budgets, and feature
requirements from day one. Jira integrates with a variety of CI/CD tools to facilitate transparency throughout
the software development life cycle. When it’s ready to deploy, live production code status information is
surfaced in the Jira issue. Integrated feature flagging tools allow teams to roll out new features gradually and
safely.
The DevOps template is designed for high-performing teams to save time and reduce errors by managing work
from a variety of tools in one centralized place. Scrolling through code in dark mode
• Release planning
• Sprint planning
• CI/CD integrations
• Issue management
• Project Backlog
• Jira Service Management integration
• Feature flagging
• Developer tool integrations
Scrum
• Scrum is a framework that helps teams work together.
• The scrum framework is heuristic; it’s based on continuous learning
and adjustment to fluctuating factors.
• It acknowledges that the team doesn’t know everything at the start of
a project and will evolve through experience.
• Scrum is structured to help teams naturally adapt to changing
conditions and user requirements, with re-prioritization built into the
process and short release cycles so your team can constantly learn
and improve.
Three essential roles for scrum
success
• A scrum team needs three specific roles: product owner, scrum
master, and the development team. And because scrum teams are
cross-functional, the development team includes testers, designers,
UX specialists, and ops engineers in addition to developers.
Product owner
Product owners are the champions for their product. They are focused
on understanding business, customer, and market requirements, then
prioritizing the work to be done by the engineering team accordingly.
Effective product owners:
• Build and manage the product backlog.
• Closely partner with the business and the team to ensure everyone
understands the work items in the product backlog.
• Give the team clear guidance on which features to deliver next.
• Decide when to ship the product with a predisposition towards more
frequent delivery.
Scrum Master
• Scrum masters are the champions for scrum within their teams. They
coach teams, product owners, and the business on the scrum process, and
look for ways to fine-tune their practice of it.
• An effective scrum master deeply understands the work being done by the
team and can help the team optimize their transparency and delivery flow.
As the facilitator-in-chief, he/she schedules the needed resources (both
human and logistical) for sprint planning, stand-up, sprint review, and the
sprint retrospective.
Development team
• Scrum teams get s*%& done. They are are the champions for
sustainable development practices. The most effective scrum teams
are tight-knit, co-located, and usually five to seven members. One way
to work out the team size is to use the famous ‘two pizza rule’ coined
by Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon (the team should be small enough
to share two pizzas).
Sprints
• A sprint is the actual time period when the scrum team
works together to finish an increment. Two weeks is a
pretty typical length for a sprint, though some teams find
a week to be easier to scope or a month to be easier to
deliver a valuable increment. But it’s really up to your
team, and you shouldn’t be afraid to change it if it’s not
working!
Sprint Backlog
• A is the list of items, user stories, or bug fixes, selected by the
development team for implementation in the current sprint cycle.
Before each sprint, in the sprint planning meeting (which we’ll discuss
later in the article) the team chooses which items it will work on for
the sprint from the product backlog. A sprint backlog may be flexible
and can evolve during a sprint.
Epics
• An agile epic is a body of work that can be broken down into specific
tasks (called user stories) based on the needs/requests of customers
or end-users. Epics are an important practice for agile and DevOps
teams.
Epic Example
• Let’s say it’s 2050 and we work for a recreational space-travel organization. We do about a
dozen launches a year, so each launch isn’t the single biggest thing we do in a year, but
it’s still far from routine and will take many person-hours to complete. That sizing is just
right for an epic.
• An example epic, “March 2050 Space Tourism Launch” includes stories for routine work
items as well as stories aimed to improve key aspects of the shuttle launch, from
customers buying space travel tickets to the launch of the rocket itself. As such, multiple
teams will contribute to this epic by working on a wide range of stories.
• The software team supporting the purchasing of tickets for the March 2050 launch might
structure their epic as so:
Epic: March 2050 Launch
Story: Update date range to Story: Reduce load time for Story: Promote Saturn Summer
include March 2050 Launch dates. requested flight listings to < 0.45 Sale on confirm page for First
seconds Class bookings.
Epic Example
• Concurrently, the propulsion teams might contribute to the same epic
with these stories:

Epic: March 2050 Launch

Story: Keep fuel tanks PSI > 250 Story: Reduce overall fuel Story: Hire new propulsion
PPM on launch consumption by 1%. engineer to replace Gary.
#garygate2050
User Stories
• A user story is an informal, general explanation of a software feature
written from the perspective of the end user or customer.
• The purpose of a user story is to articulate how a piece of work will
deliver a particular value back to the customer. Note that "customers"
don't have to be external end users in the traditional sense, they can
also be internal customers or colleagues within your organization who
depend on your team.
Example
Sources
• https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/getting-started/over
view
• https://www.atlassian.com/agile/scrum
• https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/epics
• https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/user-stories