Jet is a tool for examining and optimizing boards in Jira; it'll help you determine if a team's current practices would support their ability to provide cross-team visibility into the progress of work and how that work ties into larger company objectives. Running a Jet analysis will help your agile teams and programs prepare for scaled agile by highlighting the areas that need remediation to provide consistent reporting across teams while helping to drive outcomes across your organization.

Very Important: 

• Keep in mind, Jet is not a desktop app—it's an app for Jira that resides on your Jira instance. It's intended for admins or at least users who have Jira System Admin permissions for the Jira site you plan to install the app on.
• Jet is offered in English only--other languages are not supported and may cause data anomalies.
  

Jet's seven checks

Jet’s seven prioritized health checks will evaluate the quality of your data. The more health checks that pass, the smoother your integration to scaled agility in Jira Align will be.

Check #1: Stories should be linked to epics.

Stories with parent epics provide an accurate representation of how your work rolls up into your strategic themes.

Action

Make sure you've linked an epic in your story.

Check #2: Stories should have estimated story points.

Stories that have story points provide an accurate representation of your progress.

Action

Add estimates to your story points fields in your stories.

Check #3: Epics should have an assigned fix version.

Epics should have fix versions to dictate what release the epics will be shipped on. Releases are tied to a project in Jira.

Action

Assign a fix version in the "Version" item under a project's settings.

Check #4: There should only be one project assigned to a Jira board.

Multiple projects linked to a single board can make it difficult to measure team-level progress. That board can represent multiple teams and have sprints with overlapping dates.

Action

Ensure only one project is tied to a board by navigating to Board Settings, selecting Edit Filter Shares, and removing all but one project. You may also fail this check if there are no projects tied to your board.

Check #5: Mark custom fields as optional, not required.

Custom field configuration can affect your ability to integrate with Jira Align, a Scaled Agile tool in the Atlassian suite. If you are only syncing from Jira to Jira Align and you leave any fields as required, they will not be synced. If bi-directionally syncing between Jira Align and Jira, your issue type will fail to sync.

Action

Please mark any fields other than Description, Reporter, Priority, and Summary from your issue types custom fields as optional.

Check #6: A single sprint should only be tied to one board.

Because one board represents one team, if you have a sprint on multiple boards, it can make be difficult to measure team-level progress.

Action

Similar to health check #4, follow the instructions to make sure you only have one project on one board.

If your team is structured in a way that you can't edit Filter Shares, instead select Edit Filter Query and ensure only a single team's sprints are tied to a board.

Check #7: Sprints on a board should not have overlapping dates.

Sprints represent a (usually 2-week) planning and execution time slot for a single team. Only one sprint should be active at a time.

Action

Make sure the start and end dates for your sprints don't overlap.

Jira Boards and Scaled Agile

Boards live under projects

If you're familiar with Jira, you're probably used to putting all of your issues (stories, features, epics, and more) into a project. You'll notice under your project view that you have one, or maybe even a few boards, that act like dashboards to represent the issues in that project.

One Board = One Team

For teams that plan their work in sprints using Scrum, you'll likely have a sprint board. All work that gets planned there would belong to a single Scrum team. We wouldn't have multiple teams working on the same single sprint! This is why we use boards to represent teams in Scaled Agile.

This also applies to Kanban

Even though you can have Kanban teams that don't use 2-week sprints, it is assumed that all work on a board belongs to a single team. Just remember that a Jira board (and all of its issues) equals a single Scaled Agile team (and all of the issues it is working on).

An optimized board is a Scaled Agile board

When your team boards are optimized for Scaled Agile (work is estimated through story points, stories are linked to parent epics, etc.), all work can then roll up through an organization. This will allow your organization to track progress to quickly adapt to market changes and that's what ultimately creates an Agile enterprise.

Tips and Tricks

• When selecting multiple boards for analysis, it's best to select boards from the same project or that share the same field and issue type configurations. Selecting boards from different projects can cause field mapping discrepancies that skew results.
• Team-managed boards are not officially supported. Fields within team-managed projects are all unique, so boards should be run individually.
• When entering a Support ticket for Jet, please select Jira Align as the product.