MUST-KNOW Jira features for Scrum Masters

with a team at some point that uses jira and then I already showed you how you could use there is this necessity to know how it works even if obviously scrum Master is not a jira owner more specifically to organize everything you have there and keep it up to date keep it

know or what where they're at with progress and what they need to do next for the product owner the product owner needs to have a holistic view of the product backlog of the items that are to be created or worked on but also be able to use it to forecast so creating some forecasts maybe

planning some releases and just organize their work overall to have a better view of progress and be able to report on where the team is at with achieving their goals and then of course jira to show them what's going on in your product backlog let's jump into jira and look at some of

the most common tools and functionalities that you need to be familiar with if your team uses jira to manage their work and their product backlog here here I am at the main page and yours might look a little bit different but so far I think this is the latest view of jira as you can see I have

multiple projects here or multiple tabs basically related to different products or different teams we will be creating a new one there are different types of jira software there is jira Work Management I am using your software I think there is a difference between those two not sure what we

have Confluence and I talked about Confluence in my previous video so I'm gonna link this down in the description so that you can go and check this out we were creating team Wiki Pages we have all of these projects as you can see there are lots of items that I was kind of testing not as important

right now but what we want to do is to create a new project so we're creating a new project and we can choose what we want to do whether we want to create a kanban basically just a workboard scrum or backtracking I've never used this one I think because you can use kanban for that too so we will create a scrum project because as a scrum Master most likely you are working

with the team that is running Sprints it gives you ability to create Sprints and then you can create epics stories bugs tasks or subtasks and the workflow is extremely simplistic just has three statuses to do in progress done we'll use team managed for now and we will give it a name

so let's make our project realistic I am going to use plan and Improvement plan that I have been working on to help the team improve this is not very specific to a team so I will be gathering information from the different situations and other different projects I worked in let's put

it agile transformation usually it will just take the first letters of the name but you can also just change it and I'm going to call it agile because why not you can create the project and here we go so this is the agile board and it drops us right away into the board view which is

the Sprint view but we're not going to be looking into that just yet we'll go into our backlog just to kind of see a general idea of what it is we have our backlog here at the bottom it's empty obviously and then we have our Sprint number one that hasn't been started yet as you can see we cannot start it because it has no issues and this is one way and one place where you can

start creating items for your product backlog right so you can click right here and start creating a story a task or a bug but one thing that I generally recommend is to start thinking on the Epic Level so thinking about bigger tasks that you want your team to work on and the way to

organize it is by using epics so you can see here it says epic if I click obviously there are no epics I haven't created anything but I can show the Epic panel right here very new nothing is there and we can start creating Epic from this view we can also start creating epics from the roadmap view so if we create on the roadmap we're able to actually create epics and this

little sign here we can also create an epic or an issue by clicking on the create button at the top and we just need to make sure that we're choosing the right project here and then we can choose any issue type which might be epic so there are multiple ways of how you would go about it so

let me create a couple of epics something that would make a bit of sense so let's say that in our agile assessment we have identified that the product definition is not as well done so we're going to say that our first epic is going to be a product definition and Alignment by the way if

you want to know how to collect all of the data from your your agile analysis or assessment into one beautiful presentation that you can show to your stakeholders I do have a template that you can use it's a PowerPoint template I'm going to link it in the description in case you'd like to grab one and use it yourself now let's look into other things that we can add say product

definition and Alignment this is pretty good maybe something around technical debt that is a popular problem let's call it resolve major technical debt if this will be our epic number two and maybe let's create a third one maybe something around team building or team morale okay and the third one will be in Christy morale and team spirit so these are our three epics that

we have created obviously they don't have anything under them they're just epics so if we go into the product backlog well if we close the panel we don't have anything in the backlog because the only items that will be appearing in the backlog are the items that are small enough basically the items that we will be taking into this Sprint so let's open up our panel once again and here

we can see here are the three epics that I have created no dates no issues obviously we can view the details for the Epic in this panel here and we can start adding description so maybe product definition let's look into some of the items that we can add so we open up the Epic on

on the right side you can see this panel we can start adding description and acceptance criteria and obviously start adding the items that will be need to be done as part of this epic if you have already watched my zenhub tutorial you'll see that a lot of it is very similar to what I

have done there but let's put some items here for example some of the findings that I had so let's maybe add some deliverables for now this will be our deliverables and obviously these items will be able to help us create the user stories the tasks and everything else as part of this epic

so I'm going to save and what I'm going to do is actually open it up jira likes to use a lot of the breadcrumbs basically all of this item like links that show you the hierarchy of things and sometimes it's a bit confusing but you can kind of get into every item every ticket by clicking

the link so I'm going to open up the item for this epic agile transformation this is the Epic we have just created and obviously we can have the conversations here comments Etc but let's actually add a child issues right here to be more specific about what we need to do I have created just a few

things here kind of to be more specific so we will conduct a product definition workshop with stakeholders create documentation in our wikis then we have also Workshop talking about goals more specifically create a best of the product backlog items for the next big product goal

let's put it that way and then maybe also Identify some of the kpis and now you have your epic and all of the items that are underneath the Epic so now when we go back to the product backlog what do we see well we have all of these items here in our product backlog now appearing

you can also immediately see what epic they are related to one of the things that can be very helpful if you have multiple epics you don't want all of them to to have the same color obviously you can read what's written there but what you can do if you actually go into the Epic when you click

on the Square here so this Violet square right next to the name you can change color and I find it very useful because that kind of gives you a visual view of everything you have on your product backlog without the need to necessarily read into each detail so let's refine and as you can see now

all of them are now blue maybe let's look into the team morale I'll view all details and we'll maybe make it no so let's think about the team morale that's a good epic to discuss so what is the team morale maybe we'll have started findings let's I think what's going on the team is demotivated

okay so I added some findings just to to have something in our list so we have team is demotivated doesn't want to participate in meetings there have been no changes implemented and we have some people who left unexpectedly so let's think about deliverables okay so I have

created a few things here just uh as an example obviously and let's add some child issues to represent what are some of the tasks that we might want to do here let me change actually the type we'll put a task instead of a user story just to have something different on our board so

let's give these five obviously that's it these are the items we'll have and now we can go back to our product backlog and look at that now our product backlog looks more and more live lots of things happening now let's go into resolve major technical debt so I added a few things here into

the findings as well as deliverables just to give us some ideas so let's start creating some of those tickets this is just a few things that we can do and going back to our product backlog amazing our product backlog is looking nice now let's close this panel here just to have a bit

more overview and view of what's going on and now obviously all of it is kind of aligned with the epics they all go one after the other what we can do is start to reorganize it or for example we can do the product definition workshop and then we can do definition of that Workshop that

would be good to kind of happen around the same time we won't be waiting for the whole product definition to be ended before we would want to work on the definition of them and maybe let's run a team agreements Workshop that's an important one that we definitely want to have here so we have a few things right here we can reorganize and some other things in here so

this is how you would reorganize your photo backlog you can just drag and drop it very easy you can also if you click on this item and then you so I have selected this obviously it's going to open on the right so I selected it now I'm holding shift and it means that I can

choose like several items at a time and it means if I'm moving them I'm gonna move all of them at once as well as you can also click on say control if you want to select items from different parts that that way you're not selecting a whole group so this is control but let's say if you want to

select the whole thing you click on the first item hold shift like on the last item now you have selected everything and it means that you can make some changes all together to this items such as move them into the specific Sprint or maybe move them to different parts of the product

backlog there are some things that you can do apart from moving them around say you have 200 items in your product backlog which you shouldn't that might be a bit too many and you don't want to scroll down all the way to the bottom or all the way to the top because when you create new issues

they will appear at the bottom of the product backlog so you can actually hover over your issue let's put maybe this one at the very bottom and you can put it at the top of the backlog or at the bottom of the backlog so for example let's create say that we have created this new issue

it's at the bottom but we want to put it to the top that's it it appears at the top automatically it will it will be at the bottom but then in the same way you can move it to the bottom and now you can also do that in the same way by moving it to specific Sprints let's put in these four items

into our first Sprint so this is our first Sprint and we let's say we are starting our Sprint starts today and it's going to run for two weeks very common Sprint lengths of course you would want to have more description and potentially estimations if you are using estimations I'm not going to be

using it right now and it means that we are ready to start our spread so we can click on the start sprint button it is going to ask us a few things it is going to ask us for the dates as well as the Sprint goal this is not mandatory but it is actually mandatory in scrum you can also you know

how to start the Sprint to change those things you can actually edit it and just click on this edit button and you can say let's say okay two weeks it's gonna automatically calculate it and then we might want to want to create a Sprinkle which would be so I created this goal it's pretty

vague but just to get us started create a baseline documentation for a product and team in the team wiki space so we can kind of start update it now it is ready and let's say this is the goal that I'm bringing into the Sprint planning as a product owner and now we're thinking well wait a minute we

actually don't have any wiki space whatsoever so we have some other things that we need to discuss before would be able to actually accomplish this goal and that would be Define what tools we're going to use and create our first team page okay so I have created these two Define what Wiki tools

will use as a team and create the team overview page and obviously these items have not been added to any specific epic yet so you don't have any epic attached to them how do you change that well you can obviously click here on ADD epic or if you're you are inside of the item for example this

one on the you can click on the three dots right there at the very top there are two different three dots so this is the one you need to click add the actions and you can add parent which will bring out the menu where you can choose the Epic not everything will have to be part of an epic

but what you can also do is actually once again open up the Epic panel and you can actually move things let's say we are going to add this one to the same one and I just dragged and dropped it on the Epic and now it is part of the Epic so it's pretty easy to use and pretty straightforward

right let's actually start our spread and here's our first spread it started so this is our kanban board this is where we can actually track progress evidently right now everything sets in to do because we haven't started any work yet we also have pretty simple structure here that we have to

do in progress done maybe we want to add a couple of more let's add another one maybe in review so have to do in progress in review I'm done and obviously every item can start moving along so let's start with something simple create a team or your page and say we can actually say

well I have already created it so it's in review I send it to the team for you and now we can maybe start with the assessment when we have these items obviously we can actually assign them to someone and I'm gonna look into just a couple of things there to show you the important items and

as we are in this item so I opened up just clicked here as you can see it is not assigned to anyone means that we can assign it obviously I only have myself here so I'm going to assign it to myself and here we can see who it is assigned to and it means that at the top we can easily filter

say I just want to filter by the this person me so I click on my little icon and I can see it and then we can add people obviously or we can clear filters click in here or by clicking the same button so you can see the way your board looks so whenever you come back you can see an

overall overview of what's going on and here at the top you can see how many days are remaining now a lot of people a lot of people have the blocked column here and they would have it here sometimes here the thing is that it can get blocked at many different points I really don't

like using that I prefer to not have the blocked column for one very specific reason because jira has a very good feature that is called add a flag and now this item is highlighted so it's red right it has a little flag and it is red here very Visual and it also appears flagged in here

and that tells me well this item is flagged and it's very easy to see it in the list right here and I find it much more Visual and easy to use than having a blocked column the problem with the blocked column is that you would move items into the blocked column but then you would need

to move them back and that kind of creates a lot of confusion at which point was it blocked was it while it was in review or in progress or maybe before we even started working on it so having a flag feature definitely is a great way to use it so I definitely recommend using flag feature

rather than itself and here obviously you have your Sprint and once the Sprint comes to an end you can complete it well I still have nine days to go so I'm not gonna complete the Sprint but if we are completing this print it is going to ask you this item and I do recommend you actually

reading through it making sure that you agree with what is written here zero completed issues six open issues where do you want to move them well do I want to move in them back into the product backlog or do I want to move them to a new Sprint that this system will create for us because we don't have another one we can also go into back into the backlog and we can

create our second Sprint in advance maybe start pre-flatting during the backlog refinement you're already starting to decide what kind of issues we would like to add into the next Sprint just a few points that can be helpful if you are clicking on say an item here and you want to

actually get to the Epic if you click here it only just asks you what other epic you want to change it to but it does natural green to the Epic and if you click on this here is the issue and as I said breadcrumbs you can put you can click on this issue right here

that it shows you the parent of the the conductor product definition workshop and this is how you can get back to the Epic so if I click on the Epic here I can see here's the Epic and all the items underneath it another cool feature is obviously we started this with the roadmap

and now we have the roadmap right here we can open up and see what is the status of different issues so we started working on a couple of items right here we can see in progress and it obviously shows us the um the progress bar right here or when it is collapsed it is pretty visual this is one

way of how you can organize your product backlog there is also another feature that I really like using in jira it is the releases slash versions as you can see I don't have it here so we need to actually add them in the product set project settings so I'll go in here we have the Sprints

we can add reports and let's add releases we don't need to have the code so I'm going to actually to turn it off and now we have releases there is another way of how you can organize it and I would say that release can be used as a product goal so kind of a bigger higher level product goal and

it can be linked to a specific date or to maybe a specific set of functionality that you would like to deliver or maybe a roadmap feature roadmap Milestone so we can say something here maybe we can create a first few milestones and maybe we want to have kind of some improvements seen

all of the key items at least started for now I will add call it release 1.2 so we can put in the description should be maybe a bit more detailed and we're going to say well we started today and maybe we want to finish right before Christmas so I'm going to save and now we can see this release

and if I click on it nothing is there here's where we can go back to our backlog and start thinking about what items would go into which releases and as you can see now we have the version tab in here right and we can open up the versions panel in the same way we have different versions same

as we had epics we can in the same way now add all of it right here let's say that everything we have right now on our product backlog is part of the release very easy as you see I have just selected everything and moved it into release one you would want to start with releases if you decided to use

them because retroactively changing watch released like what item is belongs to which release is ear pain I do not recommend it and maybe if you are want to use releases start from kind of from scratch planning for the next release and if you have a very good product goal you can use it

as your release Milestone release objective and then plan for it more specifically so in this case we have our version or release both of them are the same if we click on the item it is going to be called fixed version why it is called that way I don't know but they are different ways of

how it is called releases versions really are is talking about the same thing so now when we go back to the releases we can see the progress based on the progress that is made on the items that are part of this release so if I click here well I can see all of the items I can see the status

of all the different items how many issues are in progress how many issues are done or in to do it is very very helpful to see it that way and I find it very helpful to work to get organized from the get-go and know exactly what you want to to do for every goal for every Milestone and here

it also gives you how many days are left so you can really plan ahead and see maybe we have only a few days left and most of it is in to do so we might need to get back to the drawing board and plan again do we need to adjust the timeline do we need to adjust the features that we will be

able to deliver well we need to have a discussion around that and these reports can be very helpful you can obviously add the release notes here and you can use the information from jira photos release notes obviously it will depend on how well you are creating your product backlog issues but

you can also out create your own release notes and then once you click release when the release is done will show as a green one in the list right now it's blue because it is still unreleased and in the same way you can create multiple releases and start planning ahead when we go back to the roadmap we also start seeing a release so this can be very helpful as you can see we have a Sprint

line that shows us very different Sprints that we already have and then we have releases showing us the date also very helpful because we can have a visual or review of what is going on where we are at are we progressing this will be all of the things how that you can use to help your team

plan and use the tools that are at your disposal make it easy it is not as hard as it seems really you're using your product backlog to create items to plan ahead and then you use the board here the kanban board to help you understand where your are at in regards to your Sprint goal these are

all of the key functionality that I wanted to show you in this video so really focusing more on organizing the product backlog and organizing the Sprint backlog and how you can use jira it is pretty straightforward I don't think that it has such a big learning curve as it have been before

I think they really optimize their UI right now it looks a bit cleaner it is still a little a little bit confusing I'd say but you can as you can see there are some certain features that are pretty easy to use and can be a great help for your product owner when forecasting

when planning ahead and organizing the product backlog as well as to your team to give them more visibility into the goals that are set by the product organization by the stakeholders the product owner whoever makes those decisions and it can be very easily shown in a visual way and

used to actually present then this information back to your stakeholders maybe pulling up the roadmap in your Sprint review can be a great way to actually have the conversation around the overall progress towards your Milestones I hope you learned something new and if you did

like subscribe and comment down below what other features or functionality you'd like me to look at in general Confluence or maybe what other tools you'd like me to investigate and show you how to use in your work and I'll see you in the next video cheers and scrum on foreign [Music]