Book Image

Jira Software Essentials - Second Edition

By : Patrick Li
Book Image

Jira Software Essentials - Second Edition

By: Patrick Li

Overview of this book

Jira Software is an agile project management tool that supports any agile methodology, be it scrum, Kanban, or your own unique flavour. From agile boards to reports, you can plan, track, and manage all your agile software development projects from a single tool. Jira Software brings the power of agile methodology to Atlassian Jira. This second edition of JIRA Agile Essentials, will help you dive straight into the action, exploring critical agile terminologies and concepts in the context of Jira Software. You will learn how to plan, track, and release great software. This book will teach you how to install and run Jira Software and set it up to run with Scrum and Kanban. It will also teach you to use Jira Software your way and run projects beyond the out-of-box Scrum and Kanban way, including a hybrid approach of both the methodologies and other options that come with Jira Software. Later, you will learn how to integrate it with the tools you are already using and enhance Jira with add-ons such as Confluence. You will learn to stay connected with your team from anywhere to ensure great development. Jira Software has numerous deployment options in the cloud, on your own infrastructure, or at a massive scale. You will be introduced to Bitbucket, Atlassian’s distributed version control system, which integrates seamlessly with Jira, allowing your team to work within the two applications as one harmonious environment. With this practical guide, you will develop a great working knowledge of Jira Software and your project management will become much more efficient.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Understanding the Kanban board


For those who are familiar with the Scrum board in Jira Software, the Kanban board will look very similar to the work mode of the Scrum board, with only a few differences:

  • There is no backlog view. The backlog is the first column on the board—new issues will be added straight into the Backlog column.
  • There are no active sprints. Since Kanban does not have iterations, you are always in the working view.
  • Some of the columns may have a minimum and maximum number, which appear next to the column name.
  • Some of the columns may be highlighted in red or yellow, as shown in the following screenshot, where the In Progress column is highlighted in red:

So, let's take a closer look at the Kanban board and see why we have these differences. First of all, as explained in the earlier section, Kanban does not use discrete time periods, such as iterations, to plan work in advance. Instead, work is being done constantly, going from the backlog to the finish line to be released. Therefore...