JIRA Agile or agile software development is a new and revolutionary way of developing software. Many organizations have adopted agile over the traditional waterfall model, as it lets development teams produce software with better quality, higher customer satisfaction, and improved efficiency. JIRA Agile brings the power of agile to Atlassian JIRA; the most popular enterprise issue tracking and project management system. It builds on top of JIRA, allowing you to leverage many of its customization abilities including workflows and custom fields.
With JIRA Agile, you will be able to enjoy all the features that you love in JIRA and also use Agile to manage and run your projects with an all new interface, as well as switch between the two when required.
This book is organized into five chapters, starting with an overview of JIRA Agile, how it fits in with JIRA, and how to install JIRA Agile. We then move on to introducing the two main agile methodologies, Scrum and Kanban, and how to use JIRA Agile with them. In the last chapter, we will go beyond the basics and look at ways to further customize JIRA Agile to bring out more value from it.
With each chapter, you will learn important concepts including the agile methodologies themselves and how JIRA Agile lets you take advantage of what they offer.
Chapter 1, JIRA Agile Basics, serves as a starting point for the book and aims to guide you through installing and getting JIRA Agile up and running. This chapter will also be a gentle introduction, covering basic concepts and terminologies used in JIRA Agile, laying the foundation for subsequent chapters.
Chapter 2, JIRA Agile for Scrum, covers using JIRA Agile for the Scrum methodology. Starting with a high level overview of Scrum, it describes how JIRA Agile can be used to run projects with Scrum.
Chapter 3, Customizing the Scrum Board, extends on the previous chapter by introducing some of the additional customizations available for running Scrum projects with JIRA Agile. This chapter covers some of the key customization options including board column layout and swimlanes.
Chapter 4, JIRA Agile for Kanban, covers using JIRA Agile for the Kanban methodology. This chapter starts with an introduction of Kanban and how to use JIRA Agile to run Kanban-based projects.
Chapter 5, JIRA Agile – Advanced, covers some advanced uses of JIRA Agile, including additional customization options, and how to integrate JIRA Agile with Atlassian JIRA and Confluence. By integrating JIRA Agile with these two applications, teams can be more effective at creating contents and reporting on project progress. This chapter also covers using third party add-ons for JIRA Agile, to extend its capabilities.
Since JIRA Agile is an add-on extension to Atlassian JIRA, you will need a running installation of JIRA. You can download and install the latest version of JIRA from http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/download.
For JIRA Agile, as well as the additional add-on Agile Cards for JIRA (used in Chapter 5, JIRA Agile – Advanced), you will be able to download and install them from inside the JIRA application. However, if your JIRA installation does not have access to the Internet, you can download JIRA Agile from https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.pyxis.greenhopper.jira and Agile Cards for JIRA from https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.spartez.scrumprint.scrumplugin.
If you want to get started with JIRA Agile, and learn how to run your JIRA projects the agile way, then this is the perfect book for you. Perhaps you have used agile to run your projects before, or are just looking to try agile out, then JIRA Agile is the perfect way to get started.
You will need to be familiar with the basics of JIRA, both from an end user's and administrator's perspective. Experience with workflows, custom fields, and other administrative functions of JIRA will also be useful. Prior experience with JIRA Agile is not required, but is advantageous.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Make sure you do not remove the ORDER BY Rank ASC part of the query."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Free trial button for JIRA Agile in the search result list."
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