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Agile Tools

5 pitfalls when using Atlassian Jira

Jira Atlassian is a great ALM tool for managing your Agile environment. It provides a friendly work space for Agile teams and has some informative out-of-the-box reports that allow teams to easily apply root cause analysis.

At the program level, there are several easy ways to achieve aggregated data reports and epic progress boards. The relatively new Jira portfolio also has some interesting features that enable larger organizations to manage their program, including shared planning, shared releases, progress, and mitigation plans.

Visiting many organizations that use Jira as their main tool for their Agile environment, I decided to summarize 5 common pitfalls it is best to avoid.

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Agile Tools

Agile Practices using Jira Atlassian

The more we meet software development organizations, the more we see how Jira, the most popular ALM tool out there, is being misused.  Abusing the tool is quite easy actually… Paraphrasing Tolstoy’s words from Anna Karenina, “Good Jira implementations are all alike but unhappy implementations are all unhappy in their own way”. (In AgileSparks we keep a warm place for the classics). We have seen many cases where the abuse of the tool caused frustrations and inconsistencies with the Agile mindset that put at risk the ability to benefit from Agile practices adopted by the organization.

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Agile Mindset

Develop it when it’s ripe

We need good metaphors to better understand software development. Good metaphors from our day to day can help us better understand this elusive domain.

Some time ago I wrote about traffic and not long ago I wrote about handling scope the same way you would handle a growing garden. In this short article, I would like to discuss the great opportunity for a better understanding of software development, hidden in fruits. Yes, fruits.

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Agile Mindset

No QA? All QA!

One of the major topics that intimidate test engineers is the No-QA question or approach (depending on your view of it).

I heard such responses after the session “Fiverr delivering fast..No QA”, by Gil Wasserman, Fiverr VP R&D, at our Agile Israel 2016 event. QA members asked me if they should look for their next role, and I keep hearing this concern whenever this topic arises.

So, is it true? Should we eliminate the QA role? Or better say – merge it into the developer’s role?

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Agile Mindset

The challenges of testers & developers working together in a cross-functional Agile team

One of the significant changes while moving to Agile teams is that testers and developers are now part of the same team.

This change introduces great advantages, as well as some challenges.

The immediate impact is that the testers participate in the Scrum ceremonies and get a better exposure to the product under development, its status, and its fragility. They can therefore detect better potential areas for defect finding, gain better sync for when they’ll get a drop for testing, and can better utilize their plans.

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Agile Leadership

Improving Teamwork Through Experiments

A good way to improve how a team works together is to try to run experiments for collaboration. We’ve listed here a set of experiments you may want to try, depending on where your team is in the journey for better teamwork. Each section has a description, a goal for improvement and then the set of experiments that may help achieving the goal.

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Insights

Product Owners forum

It is so great to have some slack time, as you can let your mind get off a bit from your own coaching activities and learn from others. It is also great as sooner or later you will connect the dots back to implement those insights and even write a post on it 🙂

At AgileSparks we allocate some of this slack for a Gemba walk. Today, for example, I was lucky to join my colleague in a kickoff meeting of a distributed PO forum. Leading a remote session is a challenging situation by itself, as well as working with a wide range of audiences or with distributed coaches. But let’s tackle them one by one. I promise that at the end you will also get the how to run your first distributed PO forum tips as well.

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