Whiteboard or JIRA? Regular post-its or digitalized, or a combination? This is common questions in most teams. Should we be analog or digital? What is their pros and cons? To start at, it might depend on your organization and their flexibility, or ability to really push decisions to the team. Can the team be agile and self-organized when you are dependent on others in crucial aspects of your daily job.
The organization I work at is big, some thousand developers working with Java, .NET, Web, and z/OS mainframes writing Cobol. We are under agile transformation, creating agile self-managed teams, starting to learn to work together in all aspects… collaborating. We are using JIRA to visualize what we are currently working on, and what is in the pipeline for future work. We do not have that much influence in our JIRA, instead our organization have setup a department responsible for JIRA-integration. I understand why, we have all kinds of security aspects that we have to consider and we can not risk that malicious code is spread. What we are missing though is the ability yo make changes in our workflow and issues, that should be open to everyone working in a team, and each team should be educated in how to use JIRA. Not allowing a team to self-manage its own boards is counter-agile, and for a team that want to try new ways of working it is frustrating.
But we do still have the other advantages of using digitalized boards; write comments, work from home, easier backlog management. For us this added value that we don’t want to remove. But, with that said, it still is a step away from agility… in large organizations.
One issue that we have found with JIRA however, is managing stories that spans over several months. Epics should just span some sprints (iterations), and initiative seems to be an additional feature set called JIRA Portfolio, that cost extra. An initiative can have several Epics, so it would give us the opportunity to organize and manage our backlog in a more comprehensive way. But the extra cost, and the centralized management of JIRA makes it hard for us to incorporate this kind of change that affects the thousand of JIRA users. So it really sucks Atlassian!