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Where to begin?Many developers are now using Agile methodologies to produce results. Hopefully making use of JIRA and Greenhopper for managing the backlog.Agile is an approach to managing competing project priorities of time, cost and scope. One way to visualize the interplay of these priorities is the well-known project triangle. In general, we can only adjust two of these scales (sides of the triangle) if we want the project to be successful. In an ideal world we would have control of all three, but generally project resource is finite and the time scales are fixed iteration dates. |
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For the purpose of this article, a backlog is the list of tasks which are yet to be allocated for completion. Any large project will end up with lots of things people want; as a team you can use GreenHopper use
to manage this long list of tasks by ranking, prioritising, and scheduling the work.
In this guide, we are viewing issues on a GreenHopper a
board.
Navigate to this board from anywhere in JIRA by clicking the '
Agile' drop down and selecting your preferred board.
My backlog has thousands of issues — can
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help?Yes, but you need to be realistic about what your team can achieve. Backlogs are all about priorities: do the most important things first. The idea of a backlog is to have a large pool from which to draw issues and plan work in advance only over the short term — don't schedule all your thousands of issues out and plan work for the next several years! You'll be setting yourself up for failure. Instead, plan only a few versions in advance, over several weeks or a few months at the most. Your backlog will still be waiting for you when you finish the short term work.
Organising with Filters
GreenHopper will help you by allowing you to filter options. So for instance you can filter out all the issues in your backlog which are not high priority. You may also want to filter on things such as cards with a high business value.
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You will most likely want to drill down into the backlog so important issues are more prominent. You can drill down into this backlog from the GreenHopper the
board using your board's
Filter (and, optionally,
Quick Filters).
- Your board is based on a JIRA
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. This filter can include issues from multiple JIRA projects. - At the top of the board in large text is the name of your board; below this are a number of links allow you to select a Quick Filter (you may see 'Only My Issues' or 'Recently Updated' there). Quick Filters are useful to change the issues you see -- you can use a Quick Filter to only show issues of a certain priority, reported by a certain user, or other specifications.
- Select Tools > Configure from the drop down.
- Click the Quick Filters tab.
- A Dialog will appear, which allows you to type in a name and JQL query for your new Quick Filter.
- Pick some specifications, and click Add. Then click Use board.
- Your board will now show a sub-set of your backlog based on the Quick Filter you have set.
Organising by Ranking
GreenHopper allows you to set up rankings for your issues to help you organise tasks in your product/sprint backlog more effectively. Rankings allow you to prioritise issues at a more granular level than issue priorities in JIRA, as rankings are a dynamic number — meaning, there is a number 1 issue, a number 2 issue....a number 335 issue, and so on to the end of your backlog. This is helpful for both short and long term planning, and brings important issues to the top of your backlog.
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From the charts you can ascertain a teams' "velocity" — that is, the speed at which the team is able to complete the tasks estimated in units of difficulty (hours/complexity/score out of 10). Once you know a team's velocity you can then calculate, based on the current team performance, how long the remaining tasks should take to complete. GreenHopper
helps this with by providing a chart.
Understanding the functionality of
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the
ChartsFor all the nitty gritty details about accessing the GreenHopper
charts, see
Using Report Mode (or
Using the Classic Chart Board for classic charts).
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The velocity chart will show you on a daily basis if the project is slipping or not. You can consider changing your resource if you need to alter this but don't forget that adding more people to a project wont won't give a proportion proportional increase the in the velocity points, that's a bug in people not GreenHopper
, so no bugs filed for that please.
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