Kanban Iteration

[Giri Narayanan]

Wanted to understand how to define a Kanban Iteration in Jira. Unlike a Sprint, I understand that the Kanban iteration need not be of same duration and interested in defining the same.

In my JIRA (Cloud),  i do not find any option for defining the same while creating the Kanban Board.

[Tarun Sapra]

Hi Giri,

Just to add to Nic's asnwer. Kanban backlog is a new feature only available for JIRA cloud, you can read more about it here - https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/using-your-kanban-backlog-856846180.html 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Kanban doesn't have iterations, that's the point of it.  It's a board where things arrive, get worked on and move to done.  When you're ready to release the stuff that's done, you do so.

The closest you'll get to an iteration in Kanban is to use a backlog.  Everything goes into a backlog.  You then pretend you're doing sprint planning by moving stuff from the backlog into the "ready to work on" column and that's effectively the start of the iteration (developers are not expected to pull anything from backlog).  The end of the iteration is when you release the done work.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

What you're describing is not far off a standard "scrumban", and one of the things about "agile" is that it's often unclear that it's a range of approaches that should be adapted to how you want to work, not an absolute rigid process.

However, I've pretty much outlined how you'd do a scrumban in JIRA - the point of a scrumban is it's part way between the two - you have a list of things ready to work on and you commit to them (like scrum), but you don't do the tracking, reporting and avoiding bringing new work in that scrum imposes.

[Grean Joiel]

As an addition to Nic's answer. Learn more about the new Kanban backlog functionality, exclusive to JIRA cloud, here.

 https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/using-your-kanban-backlog-856846180.html word hurdle

[Giri Narayanan]

Thanks Nic and Tarun for your responses.
Not sure if it would be more appropriate to term it as Scrumban instead of Kanban in the context of my above query . Is this (i.e defining an iteration as in scrum with Kanban) something that can be done through JIRA and how can it be done.