How to configure a Scrum Alliance Scrum Board

[Keith Thomas]

I am having difficulty determining how to configure a Scrum Board as defined by the Scrum Alliance. Part way through the linked description below they have three examples.

My preference is for the board pasted below, Example 1 from Scrum Alliance, where the first column is Stories assigned to the Sprint and the other columns are Tasks (or in Jira maybe Subtasks I guess). The Tasks are color coded by Task type (e.g. one color for developing, one color for writing software verification tests, one color for executing software verification tests, one color for Product Owner acceptance etc) to help quickly visually identify bottlenecks.

I've browsed Atlassian docs and Jira App docs and haven't found an example configured like I (and the Scrum Alliance) desire.

https://resources.scrumalliance.org/Article/scrum-board 

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Keith Thomas 

Jira boards display work items based upon a filter.  For Jira Scrum boards, they additionally filter to only display the items in the active sprint.

For any Jira board, the columns represent the mapping of Status values to each column.  There is no column on the left side for the parent Stories: that is a work item type, not a Status mapping.

Any "rows"  or swim lanes are groupings of work items.  Boards can use the "Group" dropdown to select from a limited set of fields for groups, or you may use swim lane options in the board settings.

To learn more, please read this information on Jira boards:

• https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/boards/overview#what-is-a-jira-board 
• https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/what-is-a-jira-software-board/
• https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/scrum-board

Kind regards,
Bill

[Keith Thomas]

Thank you Bill. Am I being harsh to suggest that if you are correct then Jira has incomplete support of Scrum? Tasks without their parent context are somewhat useless.

In 2023 87% of Agile practitioners used Scrum. Effectively not supporting Scrum is not supporting Agile software development.

I would be surprised to learn Jira does not support Agile.

Apologies if I misunderstood your guidance. The idea of Swimlanes is close so I'll investigate that further. 

[John Funk]

Hi Keith,

You have only shown one example from that article you linked to. And I would dare say that is probably the least used method most organizations used. I have never seen that method in use anywhere actually. 

Examples 2 and 3 of the boards are fully supported by Jira and are the most used implementations of Scrum that I have seen in my experience. 

There is a stripe on each card that you can color code if you like based on some type of query. I prefer to use the Components field if you want wanting to categorize work with colors. But as Bill has already pointed out, that is doing with the Work Type name that is visible with an icon on the card on the board. 

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Keith Thomas 

If you review the sources I provided and look at an example Jira Scrum Board, you will find the parent work item associated to items on the board can display in various ways (e.g., on each item, in swim lanes, etc.), although not in the way shown in your image from that site.

Without getting into a "spirited conversation" about how organizations define practices, please note what you see on that other site is what some teams interpret as generally accepted practices added to Scrum, but they are indeed beyond the scope of the current "The Scrum Guide" (November 2020) by the authors of Scrum.  It does not make the practices "right" or "wrong", just different.  The additions and tools people use, such as visualization / Kanban boards, are likely meant to achieve something which is in the guide, such as the team effectively managing the Sprint Backlog to meet the Sprint Goal. 

The same would be true of any tool such as Jira's Scrum Boards: they are additions to help, not re-definitions of Scrum.  In my opinion, some of the Atlassian documentation is poorly written and may confuse customers to misunderstandings of terminology, process, and purpose.  When in doubt, I suggest people check the guide and consider "what problem am I trying to solve", and "how will this tool help my team".

Kind regards,
Bill