Over the past ten years Agile practices have gained popularity in various industries. Jira Software assists Agile teams with planning their work, executing and reporting on their progress. Jira Software leverages Jira's customizable issues and flexible workflow allowing it to adapt as your Agile teams and processes evolve.

Jira Software is geared for Scrum teams who conduct sprint planning and Kanban teams that focus on managing the flow of their work. You can visualize your workflow while keeping administration overhead to a minimum.

For example, a Scrum Master can order the project's backlog (user stories, bugs, etc) via drag & drop. Using the sprint marker they can plan a future sprint which doesn't exceed the teams velocity.

Jira Software is used during an estimation session and the results of Planning Poker are added as story points to each story throughout the session. You can quickly decompose a user story into technical tasks. Within the iteration a drag & drop is all it takes for developers to change the status of the story they are working on.
Swimlanes enable high priority issues to stand out. You can also limit the amount of work in progress using column constraints. Both of these features are key to a Kanban / Lean methodology.

Finally, a range of reports and visualization gadgets help to keep track of the iteration and backlog for review by an individual or display on an information radiator.

Steps to demonstrate

The best way to demonstrate Jira Software is to setup a small project during the presentation. This will show the powerful visualization options, while also proving the enhanced productivity, the tool provides for the team.

1. Open Jira Software and create / select the project you would like to demonstrate the benefits for.
2. At the top menu, click on 'Board'
3. Create a new rapid board and give it a name
4. Start creating index cards for sample user stories and give them various story points
5. Pull the sprint marker down and see how the total story point sum of the sprint increases automatically. Set a sample story point limit for this sprint and then click ""Start Sprint""
6. At the top right, switch to work mode and pull two index cards from ""ToDo"" to ""In Progress""
7. Optional: Involve sample users such as ""Scrum Master"", ""QA Lead"", ""Developer"" and show how they are involved in the process. You can define default assignee for each phase, e.g. make QA Lead automatic assignee once an issue has been moved over from ""In Progress"" to ""Done"".

Demonstration requirements

You need to have at least the trial version of Jira Software and one project that has the agile template enabled. Also, you need to create a number of issues for your first Sprint.

Demonstration on Jira.Atlassian.com

Eating its own dog food, there are a number of products that Atlassian develops using Scrum and Kanban methodology. The projects are rich in index cards and reports and are a great first start for a demonstration.

1. Open up http://Jira.atlassian.com and select 'Board' on the top menu.
2. The screen now asks you to either select a project or open an existing rapid board. Select 'Open an existing Rapid Board.'
3. Open the 'Jira Agile Team Scrum"" rapid board and show how real issues that are currently being worked on in the Jira Agile development team are distributed over the different phases in the SCRUM (To Do, In Progress, Awaiting QA, QA and Done).
4. At the top right of the window, you should see the two menu times 'Work | Report'. Click on 'Report' and then select the control diagram. You now see a visualization of the issues of last week that enable you to measure average cycle time – the time issues spent ""in process"" – and identify specific outliers.
5. In the top menu of 'Board' (click on the pointing down triangle right to the word), select the option 'Planning Board'. If Jira Software is not selected, do so at the Project Selector right next to the Atlassian icon.
6. Review the current status of the backlog. The issues at the top of the list are prioritized the highest while the ones at the bottom stand behind in urgency / severity.