Agile project management is all about promoting collaboration, responding to change, and prioritizing working software over comprehensive documentation. Initially coined in the 2001 Agile Manifesto, it’s become a popular choice for many software development teams today. Nevertheless, agile project management requires the right tools to run smoothly.
Today, two out of three companies use Jira to handle Agile project management but opt for another tool like Jenkins for their CI/CD needs. However, this can create incompatibility issues when both platforms are used independently – which is why more teams are turning to integrated agile project development for a solution.
What is integrated agile project management and its benefits?
Atlassian defines agile project management as an iterative approach to delivering a project, one that focuses on continuous releases to better incorporate customer feedback. Compared to waterfall project management, agile is a far more flexible and adaptable approach.
Integrated agile project management combines agile practices with integration tools and platforms to streamline and optimize the software development process. It aims to improve collaboration, enhance transparency, and automate tasks to make working on software projects as efficient as possible.
How Jenkins-Jira integration can help agile development teams
Agile teams depend on tools to help them work as efficiently as possible. Here are three challenges faced by agile development teams and how an integration app can help:
1. Overcommitment or delays in project timelines
The pressure to deliver is a challenge all agile development teams face. It’s important to manage your team’s workload per sprint carefully especially if you’re working on multiple builds and tasks at the same time. New agile teams are especially susceptible to overcommitment as they may not have enough historical data to accurately gauge how much they can take on.
Solution: Integrating Jira and Jenkins generates historical data on past sprints that you can use to help estimate capacity and velocity more accurately.
Understanding velocity is key here. Calculating velocity, or the rate at which your team can deliver, is a useful tool for teams to track estimates and completions over several sprints, giving you an accurate understanding at how fast they can move through a backlog. It’s also a good way to evaluate your team’s strengths for ways to improve their metrics.
Historical data on past sprints’ velocities helps teams like yours calculate an average velocity to use as a baseline for further commitments. You can also use historical data to identify risks and challenges, anticipate potential hurdles, and manage expectations from stakeholders.
2. Little to no visibility into the development process
Transparency is key for software development. Not only does it cultivate close collaboration between team members who understand what each person is working on, it also helps to create an efficient workflow by sharing information openly within the team.
Agile development teams especially need a high level of transparency to make data-driven decisions. This needs to go both ways; managers need oversight of the work being done on Jenkins, and developers need to be aware of the project’s overall progress on Jira.
Solution: Integration automatically updates progress and build status, allowing stakeholders to remain updated.
The best way to ensure everyone has oversight of the project is to ensure that your project tracker is always up to date. Doing so will ensure that your team has a single source of truth on build and deployment status, making it easier for everyone to stay informed.
While this can be done manually by creating individual issues on Jira and remembering to update them regularly, it’s a tedious process. An integration app allows you to set rules that will ensure that what happens on one platform will be synced to the other. This creates a bridge between the two, allowing Jenkins to monitor the repository for changes and have those changes automatically made in Jira without a person doing a manual update.
3. Manual processes are time-consuming and prone to errors
Code builds, testing, build deployment, issue tracking, and reporting – these are just some of the processes that, if done manually, are extremely time-consuming, often error-prone, and can hinder overall efficiency which can make or break an agile team.
More teams are turning to automation to expedite these tasks and cut down on human errors. Automating your workflow helps to streamline tedious tasks, especially when they involve working off two platforms like Jenkins and Jira.
Solution: An integration app with automation capability can reduce manual intervention, minimize errors, and free the team to focus on actual development.
This is where an integration app truly shines. Not only will it keep both Jenkins and Jira updated, but it can also help you improve steps in the development process such as alerting you in the event of a failed build, helping you with reporting and version control, and triggering builds after certain events – all without the need to wait for someone to manually press a button.
In short, an integration app acts as a catalyst for automating most, if not all, critical manual processes in your development workflow. It ensures that every code change is efficiently and consistently processed and your team is alerted whenever an issue arises.
Consider a Jenkins Jira integration app for your agile team
An integration app links project management in Jira with Jenkins automation, accelerating manual processes and helping you avoid pitfalls like overcommitment and lack of visibility. Agile teams are built on flexibility and adaptability; an app like Jenkins Integration for Jira makes integration effortless and allows you to focus on staying on task toward your project goal.
