In our last article: “Release Management: How to track you releases with a roadmap”
We discussed how to use Atlassian Jira Software to track releases. For Teams that contribute to a release across projects, there are tools such Advanced Roadmaps and Jexo Swannly Roadmaps that allow for cross-project releases. You can view your team’s releases on a timeline with dates in a roadmap.
So far in this series we’ve discussed:
Process: Choosing an Agile Framework for your Team
Tools:
Part 1 – Selecting the right tools to prioritize your Team’s work
Some options to estimate the complexity of the work items.
Part 2 – Different ways to organize the releases available to your Team
How to use a roadmap to view releases.
Now that you have organized your work, you are ready to determine which Sprint these work items will go in. During the Sprint Planning meeting, we will need to determine how much work the Team can commit to this sprint and plan for the next sprint. The amount of Story Points that a Team can complete during a Sprint is called Velocity.
Part 3 – Sprint Management
For this article we will look at how to manage a Sprint if your Team uses Scrum.
Jira Software
Jira Software allows you to drag issues from your Backlog into the Sprint.
In order to determine how many Story Points the team should commit to in the Sprint, we can run the Velocity Report and see how many Points were committed vs completed in the last Sprints.
In the above chart, we might see that the Team committed to 15 Points in the last Sprint and Completed all of them, so maybe we can increase the velocity a bit, assuming nothing else with the Team has changed.
Advanced Roadmaps
If you are using Advanced Roadmaps (included with Jira Cloud Premium or Jira Data Center), you will have an updated Velocity Report that will display the Average Velocity that your Team has completed based on previous Sprints. In the example below: The Team has completed an average of 19.33 Points, but the Team has been committing more than 20 Points per Sprint.
In our Advanced Roadmap Plan, we can use the Sprint capacity management view on the Roadmap tab and view the upcoming Sprint:
We can set the average velocity for the Team to zero. In this case, as we plan we can see that we only have 13 Points worth of work committed to the Sprint, and we have room for 7 more points worth of work.
Monday.com
Jira Software does have both a field for Story Points and Story point estimate. This allows a team to input the amount of points they initially thought the Story was worth and update the Story once completed with the amount of Story Points the story was actually worth. This can help a team estimate better in the future. While the Jira Velocity Report can only show Story Points, if your Team integrates Monday.com and uses the Sprint Planning template, you can view a summation of both Story Points (SP) and Estimated Story Points (EP).
Easy Agile
While it’s possible to run parallel Sprints for the same project in Jira, many Teams wish to plan several sprints ahead. This can create a lot of scrolling in Jira if you have a sizeable backlog and many Teams using the same project, this can be cumbersome.
Easy Agile Programs for Jira allows the creation of Program Increments (PIs). Within a PI, a Team can drag the items into each Sprint as projected all on the same screen. Dependencies can be visualized on the board.
In this article we showed some ways to plan Sprints using Jira Software or an AddOn to make use of Velocity to plan your Sprints. We can also view the difference between Story Points that were chosen at Estimation vs the amount of Story Points completed. It’s also possible to plan several Sprints ahead.
Story Points are a great metric to track how much work is being completed. But often times, we still need to track the amount of time an issue takes to complete. In the next article in the series, we will explore Time Tracking.
If you are interested taking your Team’s Agile Processes and Tools to the next level, contact Ascend Integrated.
Ascend Integrated is proudly partnered with Atlassian, Easy Agile, and monday.com mentioned in this article.