Agile Trailblazers Blog

So you’ve got the Atlassian Suite up and running.  Jira, Confluence, and maybe some other products too, like Bitbucket and Bamboo.  Life is great!

Or is it?

Unfortunately, we often hear from customers that their Agile Lifecycle Management (ALM) suite hasn’t turned out to be the utopia they expected when they first installed it.  This isn’t a problem limited solely to Atlassian products, of course - others, such as Version One and Rally can also prove troublesome to organizations. But today, we’ll talk about some of the problems commonly found with the Atlassian suite of products, and how we address them.

 How do you know what tool to choose? JIRA, VersionOne, Rally, DAD, LeanKit... the list goes on.

Have you ever had your scrum master ask you, "what is going on with that story?"  As somebody that has assumed virtually every role possible on an Agile team over the course of my career, I can assure you that I have heard it many times, and I'm sure you have too.  Certainly there are many ways to answer this question, but in my opinion, the best way is to make it possible for your scrum master to find the answer for themselves, using the teams primary tool, JIRA.  In this article, I explain how you can make your scrum master happy by configuring your developer's primary tools, Jira, GitHub, and Jenkins to play nicely together and update JIRA stories with all of the information that your scrum master wants to see.  So let's get started.

JIRA Portfolio is a powerful tool which provides an easy way to manage one or more teams' backlogs and schedule work for months at a time. Portfolio for JIRA 2.0, which was just recently released, brings many useful changes including an easy startup wizard to create a new plan, powerful forecasting tools, and a much tighter integration with your JIRA Boards. Learning to use Portfolio 2 could be a challenge for both experienced Portfolio users as well as JIRA users thinking of trying Portfolio for the first time. Either way, this guide will walk you through setting up and getting started with Portfolio 2.

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The lack of built-in test support for JIRA can feel like a strange omission. Luckily, there are multiple JIRA plugins that add testing support to JIRA, the most popular of which is Zephyr. However, JIRA and Zephyr are extremely flexible tools, and getting their full value requires a team understanding of testing practice, and integrating those practices into JIRA.