Project management is vital to team success. Project managers must constantly deal with the demands, manage vendors, negotiate with external stakeholders, and coordinate and control everything. More than 77% of excellent teams use project management software.
It is a project management tool and can serve as a functional testing tool. It is an integrated platform, a place for all projects, users, and workflows that you can manage consistently and logically.
It can be a single destination for testing and defect tracking in the test management tool and project schedule preparation.
If you want to know more about Jira, why is it practical to get on board? Mum's the Word, Let's Find Out Together!
What is Jira?
It is an advanced project management tool designed for agile teams to optimize projects, planning execution, and tracking. The great thing about Jira software is they offer a free plan for up to 10 users, which is ideal for agile and innovative small teams. Initially, Jira software was designed as a bug and issue tracker. But today, it evolved a lot and has become an influential work management tool. It will help the small teams from requirements and test case management to agile software development.
As earlier said, Jira software offers a plan with minimal cost. Also, it integrates the team into a project. The project manager becomes aware of the following steps with the help of Jira software and works accordingly with the customer's solution.
Jira software from the past decade is helping teams around the globe to turn their ideas into reality. It is flexible and helps builds the most powerful and prominent projects. From a music streaming service, landing a rover on Mars, or distributing life-changing healthcare in developing nations regardless of the size, structure of the team, or the preferred style to work. Jira software breaks down the work to reconstruct the process.
Some Jira features.
- Project Tracking
- Agile, Scrum, Kanban
- Project Planning
- Issue Tracking
- Code Integration
- Service Desk
- Mobile
- Custom Workflow
- OpenSocial Gadgets
- Reporting and insights
- Connect to LDAP and Active Directory
- Bug Tracking
- Git Integration
- 1000's Add-ons
- OnDemand or Hosted
- Free for Open source projects
- Email Notifications
- Roadmaps
Jira software benefits
- Jira performs with the dynamics of Scrum, kanban, and agile disciplines. Jira software helps you find information fast via the Jira query language features, an advanced search algorithm.
- The cloud-hosted version of Jira is straightforward to use and quick to set up. Jira software provides a flexible payment option that you can manage with a month-to-month cash flow. Along with it, you have to add ons and remote integration. On the other side of the premise version, it will let you customize the software in detail so that it can collaborate with your workflows and processes.
- Web-based, ios, and Android are the devices supported by the Jira software.
- Jira software supports small and medium businesses as well as enterprises.
- Jira provides you with great integrations. The existing integrations are Salesforce Sales Cloud, Zephyr, Zendesk, Gliffy, GitHub, Balsamiq, Atlassian Confluence, Service Desk, and many more.
- Jira software is highly customizable. Maybe a project management tool, issue tracking software, or task management tool can fit any of your requirements. Workflows, reports, scrum boards, and more can also be customizable.
- Jira software creates agile software development reports that help you keep track of your projects. Some reports also offer user workload and show the average age or tasks in your backlog and the rate of recently created issues.
- Jira software manages your project roadmaps and shares them with your stakeholders. Jira's portfolio plan mainly includes a timetable, product backlog, and short and long-term goals. The portfolio is used in different ways by different teams. For team managers, it is used for tracking the progress of their projects and following the blueprint process to complete a project for agile development teams. For sales teams, it promotes new benefits and features.
Jira boards: Why is it helpful to get on board?
The board displays issues from one or more projects giving you a flexible way of viewing, managing, and reporting on work-in-progress. Over the past year, Jira conducted several interviews and analyzed the product feedback alongside. So later, they merge all this data and learnings and produce them in a new way on the boards of Jira software. Boards are handy for every single project and team.
There are three types of boards available in Jira, the first is the agility board, the second is scrum boards, and the last one is the kanban board.
Agility board
Agility simply means to move quickly and easily. Jira goes for a more straightforward board optimized to get team members moving. It will add and remove structure and change processes.
The agility board is still in the beta phase and has not been released yet. It's only available in the Jira cloud version. Also, the agility board is for the teams who don't want to do complex board setup and just want to manage tasks with a flexible and straightforward board.
Benefits:
- The agility board is also known as the next-gen board and is quite similar to the Scrum and kanban board.
- Initially, it doesn't provide you with all the features. It will offer you only when you need them.
- You can create a project and change the template more simply.
Scrum board
A Jira scrum board is highly accessible for technical teams who practice agile methodologies. Scrum board is for the teams who want to plan their work within time-bound iterations known as Sprint. It is a two to four-week cycle that mostly suits the team related to the development and provides working software within those sprints.
Benefits:
- It increases communication and transparency between team members.
- Sprint is a time-boxed iteration of time that promotes planning and development. Jira is designed to organize the team's work within a sprint.
- Jira scrum enhances the focus of the team and the organization.
- Sprint, backlog, user story, issue, epic, and swimlane are some essential features of the scrum board.
Kanban board
The strength of kanban is the kanban board, where works are represented visually, allowing team members to see the status at any time. It is a prevalent project management tool adopted by agile teams.
Kanban board is suitable for teams who focus on managing continuous delivery of work, so they have a backlog. They pull that backlog, pull that work into progress, and then turn to it. For any team managing the continuous flow of work, the Kanban board is the best suitable.
Benefits:
- Kanban boards focus on work, and it has flexibility in planning.
- Kanban board has an optimized cycle time through which they help their team to become more efficient to boost their productivity and forecast future work better.
- Multitasking is a huge problem for teams, so kanban is designed to identify and deal with problems before they become serious issues.
- Another vital benefit of kanban is that it has visual metrics to control charts and the cumulative flow of diagrams.
How to access these boards?
To access the board, go to the header at the top and click on the board drop-down. You'll see the recent boards you have visited, or you can go to all boards, view all boards, and list all the boards available. You can select the particular board that you want to view so.
For example, suppose you want to see a scrum board for a movie project. In that case, you will click and will list the board for the movie project and will list the columns that are available on the board and the issues available on that particular board.
If you want to switch the board, you will go to all boards again and select another boat. For example, suppose you want to see the Kanban board for the escapee project. In that case, you will select that, see the backlog, and then choose a particular issue for development.
Why is it useful?
Jira software is very useful and is widely used among IT developers to get a clear understanding of the process against any different methodologies used. Jira software also supports the web and mobile apps, making it easier for the team managers and acting differently in complex situations. It balances and maintains the agile framework.
Jira software includes multi-task-related flows, accomplishing the other team's dependency on an ongoing project.
Conclusion
Jira Software is undoubtedly one of the great methodologies to get any project done well. You can able to see the progress of your company as well as your teams. Additionally, suppose you know more about how to use Jira software properly.
In that case, it will help you prioritize your work more efficiently and effectively. Jira software supports small and medium businesses as well as enterprises. It integrates with Salesforce Sales Cloud, Zephyr, Zendesk, Gliffy, GitHub, Balsamiq, Atlassian Confluence, Service Desk, and many more.
It increases communication and transparency between team members. It has visual metrics to control charts and the cumulative flow of diagrams
