Topic Tuesday: Agile

[Wade Tracy _Boise_ ID_]

Another week, another Topic Tuesday!  Agile has been on my mind a lot lately because I've seen good implementations and bad implementations, but now as a Jira admin it matters more to me whether we are doing the 'right' things.  I used to wonder if Jira was too biased in it's approach to Agile (see posts like How do you plan subtasks into separate sprints?), but now I wonder if many of us are too liberal with Agile--how far from an established process can you get before you start to lose the advantages it was designed to achieve?

In any case, the more you fight your tools, the harder you make things for yourself and I'm starting to feel that pain in some ways.

How has your Agile journey been?  Do you have ongoing training and follow the processes religiously, or do you find yourself diverging?  How has Jira helped or hindered your journey?

[Thomas Bithell]

@Wade Tracy _Boise_ ID_ 

Our Agile journey has been pretty good. We hired a person to lead our Agile training and development for the IT department and that helped a lot.

As you know, Agile does not require a tool. It can be done on a whiteboard. It's a process and a culture change, and those were the harder obstacles to overcome. Jira lended well to our Agile implementation and learning the Jira side was not too hard for the Scrum Masters once they understood the process.

[Wade Tracy _Boise_ ID_]

@Thomas Bithell I had the same experience at Esri--when we brought in a trainer and made sure everyone was on the same page, things were much better.  We recently hired some experienced Agile folks and I'm hoping that they will help influence the key decision makers to change some of our process and get training resources.