Company is switching to agile - most efficient way to set up Jira Projects?

Alesandra Agresti

Our dev team is finally making the transition to agile. We have historically set up one JIRA Project per domain and then used components/labels to document which product the ticket belong to.  We want to start practicing Scrum and maintaining multiple boards and backlogs on a product/agile team basis.  We would like to set up JIRA in the most efficient manner, so we can optimize the tool and minimize time filling in unnecessary fields and over-documenting.   

What would everyone recommend?

• Setting up unique JIRA Projects for each product
• Setting up unique JIRA Projects for each agile team (we will likely have 7 teams)
• Setting up one JIRA project and then setting up different backlogs/boards using filters

Any lessons learned or recommendations when your team made this transition? 

Context: Our team is roughly 50 devs, 6 PMs, 4 designers and 10 QA.  

 

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Probably the first.  That's what you're used to and it's a sensible grouping of the work.  One product per project, then one Scrum board per team - a board can cross as many projects as the team needs it too, it's not locked to a project.

The one thing I'd say (having been through this transition many times), is that you should try to stick to one Scrum board per team - the reason is that trying to juggle many backlogs which don't necessarily belong to you can become quite painful.  When you've got used to working with one Scrum per team, you may want to move away from that, but when you start keep it simple. 

Some people will now say "but that board doesn't work for me" or "I want to report on and your board includes too much".  Use Kanban boards to cover those, and use as many as you need.  Even Scrum teams often have a Kanban board which allows them to focus on the day-to-day work, with the Scrum board being used more for planning.  All you need to remember about using Kanban boards as views onto the same data is not to press "release" because that will set all the versions on the "done" issues.