Jira - Agile Buddha

It’s common to have applications available for multiple platforms (web, Android and iOS) these days. In most cases, common backend services are used irrespective of the interface.

In such cases, it is tempting to have separate teams for backend and front-end interfaces. Unfortunately temptation in this case doesn’t help the business. It becomes very difficult to see the functional progress while having separate backend and frontend teams. On the surface, it looks like everyone is busy but in reality, the outcome can be frustrating with no production ready features.

The solution is to have functional cross-functional teams which could work on a vertical slice end-to-end. For instance, it’s ideal to have a team focused on iOS platform comprising both iOS and backend developers.

Makes sense, but then how to handle the redundancies as the same service may be useful for web as well?

In our earlier post – Improve sprint throughput we had discussed about how important it is to have stories ready for play before team picks it as part of the sprint. In short, if half-cooked stories are pushed to sprints for execution, then team will spend lot of time analysing, re-working and this eventually reduces team throughput. To address this challenge, few of my teams thought of creating a separate planning board in Jira to track planning readiness. This board was used by PO primarily to keep a tab on the backlog and also by team members during backlog grooming session.

Team was using Atlasssian Jira, I will show here how we modified the workflow and boards within Jira. Some of the issues teams had faced with the backlog not being ready were:

Insufficient scenario analysis in user stories
Lack of functional and technical impact analysis
Not much details/mocks within the story
Team doing sizing estimate during sprint planning – this was the first time team was seeing those stories and hence made sprint planning long and inefficient

Hence a workflow was designed to address above issues. Take a look at the workflow below(pasting it from Jira).

Jira and Agile : Using One Backend for Multiple Platforms

Use Planning Board for Product Backlog Grooming