The way scrum boards work seems wrong

[Jason Clark]

I've been doing scrum for several years, mostly using real boards on a wall and / or online tools like TFS. I just started using Jira / Greenhopper at a new job and find the way your agile boards work to push you to work in an a anti-agile manner..

The end user seems to be pushed to plan a sprint for each person individually, i.e a board shows each person and their stories. This is fairly backward to how a scrum board should look... You should have a set of stories with tasks bellow them and different people working on the tasks to bring the story to completion. Let's say for example that your deliverable that has value is a user interface where the user fills in some items and persists this to a database. Tasks off of this could be create UI, create rest endpoint, create database schema. Different people could work on those tasks... but the way the boards look is you have a user with his stories and tasks. Scrum is about the TEAM not the individual people, it should show the stories making their way through the process of being worked on to being verified and complete...

Am I missing something?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

It sounds like someone has set up your boards with a user focus. The simple answer is to amend your boards or create new ones without that focus.

I'd try creating a new board from scratch, accepting most of the defaults, and see how that works out - I don't get any mention of users beyond the assignees on cards when I do that.

Have a look at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AGILE/Creating+a+Boardand https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/AGILE/Using+a+Boardto see what sort of thing I'm seeing.