Jira Projects for Agile?

JD Lobue

Can anyone tell me why Atlassian calls the creation of a new JSW work for agile teams, projects? Projects as we know have a beginning and an end. That is the definition of a project. Agile teams doing work for a product or product set, while having a beginning, and unless you see your product going out of business in the future, do not have an end in sight. Seems to me Atlassian is allowing traditional (waterfall) mindset to creep back into empirical process control (agility). It makes me wonder if Atlassian really understands what agile is all about. Maybe this is why so many out there are stating that Jira is an anti-pattern to agility? Would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks

Scott Theus

Hi @JD Lobue ,

While I can't speak for Atlassian, I have some thoughts on why this is so. First, Jira started as a bug tracking application in 2002, targeted at software developers. Agile was just becoming popular at that time and the concept of managing products instead of projects had not been developed. 

As Jira evolved into a project management tool Atlassian kept the terminology; that is why items in the work breakdown are still called "Issues" and not just "User Stories." This allows greater flexibility when managing products, whether as an end-to-end project or as an ongoing product lifecycle. 

Finally, I believe Atlassian recognizes that Jira is not just a tool for Agile development; rather it is a tool for team development. Every organization will implement Agile differently and in my experience there are very few pure Agile teams.

So, I think the better question is why would Atlassian want to limit JSW to just Agile product development when they can maintain a tool that works for Agile teams, waterfall teams, Devops, or any number of hybrid organizations?

-Scott