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

[Keith Thomas]

Thank you Bill, I agree with many of your sentiments especially Atlassian documentation. 

I have started my Sprint an I now see - upon close inspection - I do have a scrum board. The Stories are represented as rows not columns, which is OK as such:

However this leads me to guess that not everyone is aware that agile processes are effectively recipes for Lean practices - see the excellent Lean books by Craig Larman for more Lean details.

One fundamental Lean concept is visual management. A scrum board is a visual management artifact. Unfortunately the Atlassian implementation falls some way short of Lean expectations fir visual management unless I have an enormous monitor:

[John Funk]

Curious - how is it falling way short? How many columns do you have on your board? And why? 

[Keith Thomas]

@John Funk Good question.

I have six stories assigned to the sprint but on an average size monitor I can cannot even see full the status of two of them. There's so much white space on my screenshot too. I find it hard to imagine the design goals Atlassian had for this view.

I'd love to be able to add color coding to (sub)Tasks too, especially color by function and some sort red highlighting of (sub)Tasks with challenges. As per the AI summary of Lean visual management color codding is important, especially tagging items red where action is needed. Color coding by functions allows visual detection of bottlenecks,, Maybe this can be done in Jira but I don't know how. I'd love to know how.

[Bill Sheboy]

For a company-managed project, a color-stripe may be added with this feature:

Board settings > Layout > Card colors > pick your method.

From what you describe, perhaps try using Queries with a JQL expression to select the work items for a color.  The selection is in order of the queries, so drag-and-drop the queries for your desired precedence.

[John Funk]

For the colors, Bill is correct and that can certainly be done. 

For the layout - first, is that really the only columns you have in your process? How in the world would you identify bottlenecks with that? 

Next, the names of your sub-tasks really appear that they should be steps in your process (i.e. columns) and not individual tasks. 

And finally, with most clients that I deal with (and my own experience with agile teams) - sub-tasks are really frowned upon. I know some people like them and use them, but most that I have experience with leave it at Epics and Stories/Tasks. I see more people go above Epics with things like Features and Initiatives than I do with teams going down to Sub-tasks. 

Which lead me to believe that you are just as new to Agile as you are to Jira working with Agile - is that the case?