Agile and Jira overview - Jira Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video we will discuss both an agile and a Jira overview. We will describe agile; We will describe Jira; Identify how Jira relates to an agile mindset; Create a Jira project; Create a Jira issue; Use a project board; And identify Jira user types. Let's start with an agile overview. What is agile? If you would ask 10 people, you would probably get 10 different answers. Some examples: It's a way of getting things done; It's an empirical approach to project management. This means that you use a scientific or data-driven approach to project management. With agile, you continuously develop the plan, the process, and the product. This is in contrast to developing the processes and plan upfront and then executing the creation of the product in stages. And also, agile is a mindset or a way of thinking. That's a big focus in this course, to understand that agile mindset. Why are teams using agile approaches? First of all, because of its effectiveness. Teams that use agile project management approaches perform better than traditional teams; Agile approaches empower the team. This leverages the knowledge of the individuals in the team, and an empowered team leads to an increase in job satisfaction; And finally, it's a way to manage complexity. Agile is a relatively simple project management approach, allowing you to work with very complex projects. Especially as complexity is increasing, it's important not to use complex project management approaches to manage this complexity. So basically, we are using simplicity to deal with complexity. What is an agile mindset? It's a growth or continuous improvement way of working. Instead of having fixed skills and processes, you are continuously improving. An agile mindset means that you are open to empirical approaches. And this means that you're allowing the data to change your approach. And finally, an agile mindset uses agile techniques to accomplish work. We'll see many of these techniques throughout this course. So why is it important to have an agile mindset? For an agile team to perform its best, all team members must have an agile mindset. A team that tries to be agile without the correct mindset will not be very effective. The Agile Coach site, atlassian.com/agile, contains great resources related to many aspects of agile. You are encouraged to take a look. Next we will discuss an overview of Jira. Jira is a tool that helps teams perform, visualize and manage its work. And Jira models the team's current processes or workflows. This means that Jira can be configured to conform to the way that the team wants to work. A team would use Jira to leverage project management technology, allowing the team to focus on their work. Many of the administrative tasks involved with project management are handled automatically by Jira. Teams use Jira to facilitate the planning, prioritizing, organizing and completing of its work. Jira is used because it visualizes work using project boards, reports and dashboards. We will see in this course that visualizing work is a key principle of both lean and agile, and Jira facilitates team communication. This allows the team to effectively discuss and focus on its work. So how does Jira relate to an agile mindset? Jira is a tool that teams can use to model and execute their agile processes. Basically, Jira is a tool that helps implement the practices related to an agile mindset. Next we will discuss projects, issues, boards, and user types. A Jira issue is an item of work or a work item identified by the team. An issue in Jira has an associated type. For example, a story, task, or bug. We will work with the different types of issues throughout this course. The details of the issues are known as fields. Things like an issue's title or creator are listed inside of the issues fields. What is the Jira project? A Jira project is a collection of related issues. It's up to the team to decide which issues belong to a certain project. A Jira project can be considered a teams to do list. A Jira project can have a fixed end date or be an ongoing project. So you don't have to think of a Jira project as a traditional project just having a fixed start and end date. A project has an associated type, for example, kanban and scrum, and we'll create projects of these types in this course. Each issue has an issue key. We see here an issue key, PROJ-1. Jira automatically assigns a unique issue key to each issue. The issue key is made of two main parts. The first is the project key, which is the same for each issue inside of a project. This project issue key is PROJ, as well as a unique issue number, in this case, 1. The combination of the project key and issue number ensures that every issue key in Jira is unique. Each issue belongs to only one project. In this simple example, we have two projects, each containing three issues. A project board can be thought of as a two-dimensional to do list. This is a way to visualize issues. In this example, you can see issues in different columns. Those columns represent a visualization of the team's process or workflow. Using a project board, you can easily see the issues and where they are in the team's workflow. In Jira, the issues are displayed on project boards as cards. There are three main Jira user types. The first is the Jira administrator. They know the most about Jira technically and they configure the Jira instance for all of the users. A Jira Project administrator can configure a Jira project to match the team's process. You can think of a company as having a few Jira administrators, one or more Jira project administrators for each project, and then many team members working on the projects. Here's a review of what we've discussed: Agile is a way of working on projects; Jira is a tool teams use to manage and visualize the work of a project; Jira can be configured to match a team's continuously improving processes; A Jira issue is an item of work identified by the team; Project boards visualize a team's work; The main types of Jira users are Jira administrators, Jira project administrators and team members.