Fake Agile Teams Waste Too Much Time on Project Management Tools like Jira

Using Jira ≠ doing Agile. In fact, fake agile teams waste too much time using project management tools.

Image credit: https://pixabay.com/vectors/time-alarm-clock-deadline-hand-5961665/

When starting on a new software project over the past 15 years, a new starter would find that the whole software development is centred around a project management tool, typically Atlassian Jira. We see the following activities using Jira (or another similar tool) in a fake Agile team:

• A Business Analyst creates a user story in Jira

• The Agile coach plans a sprint on Jira.

• The team estimates user story points on Jira.
  (Yes, estimating user story points is silly, but still, many teams are doing it)

• In daily stand-up meetings, team members often use Jira.

• Developers started coding on an assigned user story (reading it on Jira).

• Developers and Business Analysts comment on user stories to clarify requirements on Jira.
  (This is very ineffective and common. Also, nearly every story with long conversations leads to more misunderstandings and sometimes blame. Why are people doing that? Because the project needs records, not trusting the team members. Crazy!)

• A Tester started testing a user story (reading it on Jira).

• A Tester raises a defect on Jira.

• Agile coach/ScrumMaster does showcases using Jira
  (Fewer and fewer software teams are unable to perform real showing business features in the app. For why, check out this article: “My Innovative Solution to Agile: Automation-Assisted Showcase”)

• Agile coach/ScrumMaster record retrospective notes on Jira or Confluence

• The project manager does Defect Triage (using Jira)

Wow! That’s a lot.

For several recent projects I observed, I estimated that approximately 50% of software team members’ time was spent using Jira, someone else’s software. Think about it, that’s crazy!

A tweet: from Andy Hunt, coauthor of the Agile Manifesto

Of course, this Jira-centred Agile is bad.