A Practical Approach to Jira Essentials for

Scrum Masters

JIRA session for Atlassian Community

By Suharshani Wickramasinghe

14th September 2023

 1. Agile and JIRA relationship
2. What is JIRA
3. User Story Creation, Backlog composition
4. Creating EPICs and tagging Stories to Epics
5. Epics and Roadmap view
6. Adding estimates to the Stories (Story Point, Effort)
7. Conducting an effective Backlog Grooming session
8. Adding stories to the Sprint Backlog
9. Effective Sprint Planning Session
10. Creating and Starting a Sprint
11. Configuring an Agile (Scrum) board
12. Monitoring and Tracking the Agile Board (Scrum Board)
13. Closing a Sprint
Outline 14. JIRA Dashboards

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 1. Agile and JIRA relationship

Known as Refers to an
Agile management Iterative, incremental method of
managing the design and build
Agile process management
activities of engineering, information
Agile technology and other business areas

Agile: Scrum can be

Agile executed by different
tools. JIRA is one of the
key tools.
Agile project management focuses
on
Aims to provide
Continuous improvement
New product or service development
in a highly flexible and interactive Scope flexibility
manner Team input
Delivering essential quality products
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A Practical Approach to Jira Essentials for Scrum Masters
 2. What is JIRA

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 2. What is JIRA

• Jira Software is part of a family of products designed to help teams of all types
manage work. Originally, Jira was designed as a bug and issue tracker.
But today, Jira has evolved into a powerful work management tool for all kinds
of use cases, from requirements and test case management to agile software
development.
• Is Agile and JIRA are same?
No, JIRA is basically a component/tool of Agile, only which ensures smooth flow of
agile methodology. JIRA provides Scrum and Kanban Boards that are highly
customizable.

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 2. Creating a project

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 3. User Story Creation
What are the key components of a user
story?
• Acceptance Criteria
• Narrative
• UI Layout
• Nonfunctional requirements

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 3. Creating a backlog consists of stories

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 4. Creating EPICs and tagging Stories to Epics

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 5. EPIC and Roadmap view

Importance of having
the Roadmap/Timeline
view?
Because it contains a
visual representation of
your strategic plans

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 6. Adding estimates to the Stories (Story Point, Effort)

1. Identify a Base Story

2. Walk Through the Requirements of the Story
3. Discussing the Implementation approach of the stories
4. Create stories for estimation
5. Planning Poker Process
• Each estimator gets a set of cards.
• All estimators select backlog items, discuss features, and ask questions;
• When a feature has been fully discussed, each estimator privately (to make the estimate objective) chooses a card
to represent his or her estimate;
• When all estimators have made their estimates, they reveal their cards at the same time. If all estimates match,
estimators select another backlog item and repeat the same process. When estimates differ, the estimators
discuss the issue to come to a consensus.
• By the end of Planning Poker,
team must update JIRA relevant story points.

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 7. Conducting an effective Backlog Grooming session

Backlog refinement (formerly known as backlog grooming) is when the product owner and some and/or the
rest of the team review items on the backlog to ensure the backlog contains the appropriate items, that they
are prioritized, and that the items at the top of the backlog are ready for delivery.

•removing user stories that no longer appear relevant

•creating new user stories in response to newly discovered needs
•re-assessing the relative priority of stories
•assigning estimates to stories which have yet to receive one
•correcting estimates in light of newly discovered information
•splitting user stories which are high priority but too coarse grained to fit in an upcoming iteration

Q -What are the practical scenarios where we have to split the user stories?

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 8. Adding stories to the Sprint Backlog

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 9. Effective Sprint Planning Session

•Sprint planning typically involves the entire team.

•A product owner identifies the candidate product backlog items and their relative priorities, as well as
proposes a sprint goal.

•The team members determine how many of the product backlog items they forecast they will be able to
complete and determine how they will deliver those product backlog items.

•A scrum master or coach typically facilitates sprint planning in order to ensure that the discussion is
effective and that there is agreement to the sprint goal and that the appropriate product backlog items
are included in the sprint backlog.

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 10. Creating and Starting a Sprint

Best Practices:
1. Setting the Sprint goal
2. Setting the timelines (custom or regular)
3. Starting the Sprint

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 11. Configuring an Agile Scrum Board

1. Purpose of having an Agile Board?

A tool that helps teams plan, visualize, and manage that work.

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2. How to Monitor and track Agile Board? 2023 16
 14. JIRA Dashboards

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 Suharshani
Wickramasinghe

Thank you
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