Tom Breur
16 August 2015
JIRA was developed
primarily as an issue tracking and project management tool. But many people use
it to store their Agile (Scrum, XP) backlog. In that realm, some cynic Agile colleagues
have coined the phrase: “JIRA is where requirements go to die.”
In the interest of full
disclosure, I have to admit that I personally resent working with JIRA. Not
because I think it gets used incorrectly so often, but more because I find the
interface clunky, cumbersome, and generally unpleasant to work with. If you use
the JIRA Kanban board, it mostly does what an electronic Kanban board ought to do.
My esteemed colleague
Michael Mahlberg has made an excellent case for using paper boards, if you can. But for many
geographically distributed teams this simply isn’t a viable option, and then
JIRA seems to be a frequent choice. One of the arguments for this is that it’s
free (at least for Open Source projects)… As if time sunk in a poor interface
doesn’t cost anything, but that’s a different topic for another post.
Of course the problem with
using JIRA for your backlog isn’t really JIRA:
it’s the way people use JIRA. Imho
there are many ways to misuse this tool. One such case is where the supposed “Scrum
master” tracks progress of project work by tickets moving around. A thinly
disguised Waterfall version dressed up as an Agile project.
As soon as a request comes
in, it gets assigned a ticket ID (JIRA Kanban card), and they should get
processed in the order dictated by the Scrum Product Owner (or Customer in XP).
Provided it is current and up to date (which is a big assumption…).
Now if the Product Owner
would really “own” the product, this might work out ok. But often, the
unpleasant work of dealing with these “details” gets delegated to surrogate
product owners who handle this tool just like any other obligation they have
been requested to take on.
those get processed in the
order dictated by the Scrum Product Owner (or Customer in XP). But because the
real customer looses any connection to her original request, “submitting” a
ticket begins to feel like a march into the funeral grounds. No happy ending
for this Story…
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