Jira

BloomTech Labs and Jira

In this section, you will learn about Jira and how your teams will utilize it. Jira is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. One glance, Jira tells you tasks actively worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.

Imagine a whiteboard filled with lists of sticky notes, with each section as a task for you and your team. Now imagine that each of those sticky notes has photos, attachments from other data sources like BitBucket or Salesforce, documents, and a place to comment and collaborate with your teammates.

Objective

Teams will be required to use Jira in labs. Jira brings clarity to each team member. Your team will use Jira during all phases of your development, and the board will follow the same theme. This section will review how your team will set up your board and an overview of each section.

Jira Board Overview

Kanban is a methodology that comes from Japanese manufacturing practices developed in the mid-20th century. Factories would use written cards handed from person to person to communicate the status of operations. These cards were a "lean" way to manage the creation of products that was highly responsive to the realities on the ground.

In the same way as efficiently manufacturing cars, agile software development requires responsiveness to changing realities. Microsoft began developing an approach (that was soon iterated by many) to track progress on a "Kanban board"—a set of columns containing cards representing bits of work. The development team would move the cards along the board to different columns to represent their status.

Cards - The basic unit of the kanban board. Cards represent user stories, features, notes, and tasks. Your team will be able to drag cards from list to list to indicate progression, status, or what-have-you. You can add people to cards, label them, vote, attach files, start conversations, and create a task checklist.

• A card represents a unit of work

• Work will flow in single units or small batches

• Limit work in progress (WIP)

  • Monitor the cards that go into the in-progress lane

• The number of Kanban cards equates to project work known as units

  • The project manager (PM) uses this to determine capacity for the team

  • Each card gives the PM a view of who is assigned

  • Only in-progress items should be in the in-progress column

• New work can only start when space is available