JIRA in an Agile Environment

I am on the second project now that uses Jira for Scrum.

The experience is different: positive & negative. I'd love to see Jira targeting Agile environment, otherwise it might lose the market in 2-5 years...

Any plans of Atlassian toward this? (Would be nice to see Jira's roadmap in terms of new features for the thankful agile audience....) So far all the things I asked from the supported were shortly mailed back with "Please use our brillian API to build any extensions of yours". It is quite good that Jira has its API, but sadly not all companies have the resources to develop and maintain such projects... at least the ones I've worked for did not.

The agile plugins listed on the extension page are quite hard to deploy and configure. I spend lots of time e.g. to setup the laughing panda one on burndown chart and finally it drew a nasty unusable chart... If Atlassian doesn't take care of this, some other companies can build and start selling demanded extensions... Is it allowed actually by Atlassian's license?

So far I am quite positive with Jira actually, but a dozen of good features (some of them I have on my mind) can really improve the situation...

I'm right with you on the need for better agile methods. So far I haven't been impressed with the "shoehorn" plugins.

I know XPlanner had intended to add a way for Jira issues to be synced with XPlanner stories but I think its still far from usable (if it exists). I also find XPlanner much heavier than what I really want. 

+1

in ScrumAndXpFromTheTrenchesHenrik Kniberg mentions attempting to use JIRA as a Scrum product backlog. The reason they sticked with Excel instead was the product owners found it too click-intensive. I'm currently considering what to adopt as a backlog for our Agile project as well, and am concerned with the same issue.

 Even Sharepoint provides (only in IE though) ability to do bulk data entry/modification. In order for JIRA to win some ground here, it must provide better bulk data entry/modification capabilities, including rearranging, moving around, etc.
It should allow dealing with it like a list on a virtual whiteboard, while screening the backlog during a sprint planning meeting, without the need to do work later offline because its too cumbersome...

 This is true for non-Agile work as well...

I am thinking about how to use jira as a product backlog. The problem is that I cannot have an absolute order of goals/tasks, i.e. the jiraissues are assigned a priority, but it is not communicated in which order Priority 1 issues are to be tackled. Anyone any thoughts on this? I breifly evaluated scrumworks about 2 years ago. Their backlog was not too bad, as far as I remember. As scrumworks were using a propietary database importing / exporting data was difficult. Therefore we did not switch to it. IMHO it would be great if Jira would support agile methodologies more.

Lila, thanks for sharing.
It is nearly a year since I posted my comment here. Not so much progress, discussions and initiatives. Seems agile folks already gone away from here.

Though, we are still using Jira and still doing our Scrum-based sprint/release planning.
In order to rank backlog items we have a numeric field. You are correct priority is of no use here.

The drawback is that one needs to edit the numeric field manually each time to avoid duplicated values, and you can image how boring it is (similar to the hassle of managing project work-flows, lol).

A way to make the things better (in theory) would be to create a new field type (similar to the top/down arrows they have in sub-task view of an item) in order to simply move the backlog items instead of editing the numeric order value.

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"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice ..."

For issue ordering (we use this to maintain backlogs) check out http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/Custom+Issue+Order

Hello Lila and Alexey,

You may want to re-eval ScrumWorks -- because they now have a new integration with Jira.  See the release notes -- http://www.scrumworks.com/scrumworks/pro/features/integrations

We're using it with success -- glad to see that they are moving in this direction.

Stan B

Before trying integrating other applications in your JIRA, have a peek at the GreenHopper option.
I think you might be very surprised on how well JIRA with GreenHopper supports Agile.
It offers:

1. A planning board
2. A task board mapped on your workflow
3. A chart board with velocity charts, burnup and burndown charts.
4. Issues as sticky cards
5. Capability to order your backlog
6. Notify your issues with impediments
   and so on ...

The GreenHopper project also follows the same philosophy as Atlassian:

1. Public road map
2. Very open to requests

Cheers,