Team moving to Agile, Scrum or Kanban?

Michael McDonald October 10, 2013

My team is in the process of changing to Agile development and hoping to use the tools built into JIRA Agile. We work on web analytics, and I'm beginning to think Kanban is our friend because we do a lot of maintenance/bugfix work that doesn't really fit into the sprint model. We are trying to setup a process that makes our current work more visible to parties that are interested in getting their issues in our queue.

I setup a Kanban board with the project we've been using for years but I'm unhappy with some of the defaults. For one, the Done column is showing tickets from the very beginning of the project. I would "Release" them, but that doesn't really make sense as they were all released at various times throughout the last several years. Beyond that, "releases" don't really work for us because we often are applying hotfixes (after testing of course).

Another problem I have is that the Reports show issues from the beginning of the project. I would rather only see data going forward from the switch to Agile.

I setup a Scrum board as well, but Epics and Versions don't really apply to our group. Ideally, we still want to maintain some idea of "sprints" because we want concrete goals for when we will finish working on certain issues. Our manager wants to break work down to week long pieces of time where we can show senior leadership and interested parties what we're doing currently, and what we have planned. Some of our issues will span a greater time than one week though, so one week sprints don't work. Does anyone have some ideas for how we can configure a board to work for us?

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Thomas Heidenreich
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October 10, 2013

Maybe you could extend the board filter by "AND (status != done OR updated > -4w)" so you do no loger get issues which sit in the done colum for more than 4 weeks...

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Justin Leader
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November 20, 2013

I agree with Thomas' suggestion, and use that frequently with Kanban teams. If you need any other advice on making Kanban scream for your team, feel free to email me at jleader@go2group.com.

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October 10, 2013

you can use release in the kanban board or you can bulk change every set of issue that belong to the last several years ... if Versions does not apply ( http://semver.org/ ) , just set the version to the date of release

ie :

sprint name : 2013-10

kanban release : 2013-10-1

as a side note : you can use both board

scrum = everything that is on the team planning ie : sprint

kanban = everything that is not in a sprint ie : hotfix, support, etc ..

you just have to adjust the jql query of the kanban board with fixversion is empty or Sprint is empty

best regards

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