How a Digital Issue Tracking System affects Your Journey to Scrum.

Three examples of how changing our Jira approach changed our way of working with Scrum.

Talk to any team about their tools and they will most probably tell you they work with a digital issue tracking system. Jira is probably the most popular one. I myself started working with Jira 8 years ago and I’ve become quite the guru at it. I find it an invaluable tool.

My struggle has always been with the way a digital issue tracker encourages a process-driven approach which often leaves little room for the more humane aspects of an Agile approach. Setting up huge controlling processes is simply too easy, and it ends up turning the first Agile value on its head:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

The image below shows a rather typical example. This is an organisation where processes have been set up by a team of experts mainly to enforce a governance system.

Encouraged by a SAFe approach, work filters down from higher management, going through the Architecture and Design departments. The work is pulled by team analysts, who break it into stories and finish specifications. Teams have nothing much left to do but estimation and building.

If you were to visit this organisation you would get the feeling that they had made a successful Agile Transition. Scrum Teams, dogmatic adherence to the Scrum events and an inexhaustible smattering of jargon. An Agile paradise!