Agile project management using Jira

Organizations are moving away from traditional waterfall project management processes to iterative, fast, smooth, and systematic Agile project management processes. The Agile method for product development selects the most relevant requirements in each iteration or cycle and produces parts of the final product in each cycle.

Iterations are generally shorter and hence it is planned for a limited period. It provides the flexibility to reverse any new changes without affecting the larger product being developed. Thus, it helps to reduce the risk of failure and controls its impact. Comparing this to a traditional waterfall process, each development phase is complete but is interdependent on the previous phase.

This results in impacting the project timelines directly if any changes are introduced in the later phases. This interdependency, and longer periods of planning, result in a higher risk of failure, including cost and resources and overshooting the budget, and could possibly result in a product that doesn’t meet the client’s requirements. The following diagram shows a comparison of a waterfall process with an Agile process:

The Agile method for product development provides greater flexibility with reduced dependencies. It helps teams to work in parallel on the roadmap outline, while being able to monitor and control each aspect of the deliverable based on the budget, skills, and resources of the team.

There are various types of Agile methodologies, such as:

• Adaptive Software Development (ASD)
• The crystal method
• Dynamic System Development Method (DSDM)
• The feature driver method
• Lean and Kanban software development
• Extreme Programming (XP)
• Scrum

Jira provides templates for the most widely used Agile methodologies—Scrum and Kanban. Let’s explore the Scrum and Kanban methodologies and gain an understanding of common terminologies that help implement projects using Jira.