Make JIRA Come Alive
Agile Software Development is the norm in many companies
these days but with as much progress as there has been with the methodology and
introduction of such frameworks as Scaled Agile Framework (SAFE), has the
program managers, release managers, and scrum masters embraced a new way to look
their JIRA data? With over a decade of
experience with JIRA, I am very comfortable building my own queries to drive
into the data that I need. I would be
bold enough to even say I occasionally can create magic of the data that
resides in JIRA to allow analysis that many executives/leaders never knew was
possible using the tool. After all, isn’t
JIRA data just flat?
Let Me Introduce ALM Works Structure
If you have not been introduced to Structure– Project Management at Scale by ALM Works, where have you been it’s
2019! This has been a hidden gem in my
arsenal for many years now in order to visualize all those links and
associations you’ve been masterfully creating in JIRA. The power in visualizing the hierarchical relationships
is using what they call generators to automatically update the content within
the structures. If you create a normal JIRA
query, it will update as data is added to the system.
This dynamic and automatic generation of data within a
visualized view is immensely powerful in analyzing so many elements of your
agile software engineering organization.
Below you will see a very basic setup that showcases the power of the hierarchical
view of data with even progress stats rolled up from the scrum teams completing
their stories. Furthermore, I love that
a unique link with a custom view of fields can be shared across an organization
OR pulled into a Confluence wiki page.
Food for thought, imagine creating a structure of all your releases
dependencies across all the JIRA issue opened by a single generator. It really is that powerful!
As your Structure skills increase, you are even able to perform custom formulas to generate the data view that helps answer the data question your organization might have as shown below.
Need a view other than the native JIRA Scrum Board that you
created to view the distribution of work across a scrum team? This type of arrangement and crunching of
data is what this tool excels at! I can
typically create a fully functional structure to visualize my data in a few minutes
to analyze basic data. Once you generate
the basic structure, it almost always yields more questions that need to be
answered. That is where creating folders
and pulling in data with multiple queries to fill the folders with different
data showcases another powerful option within the tool.
Wrapping it Up
Software Engineering has evolved to use Kubernetes and Cloud
Servers, why can’t project management’s technology swiss army knife evolve as
well. As a Program Manager, you need to
know the data and be able to look at the project from different angles. Think of Structure as a tool to provide
different perspectives. The value of
viewing data from a relationship perspective will provide you a view of the
project/program that will be required in the program management role that many
other team members will not have.
If you are a JIRA user, do yourself a favor an evaluate this
tool for your organization.
Credits:
All Images from AtlassianMarketplace
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