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Waste is expensive! 💸 It’s paying someone not do any real work, paying for supplies you don’t need, or paying for team members to sort out a preventable issue. Lean agile aims to eliminate wasteful resources and tasks for improved efficiency and reduced costs — while never sacrificing quality. In fact, lean agile prioritizes bringing value to the customer with every decision that’s made.

Lean agile is a development method that helps teams identify waste and refine processes. It’s a guiding mindset that facilitates efficiency, effectiveness, and continuous improvement.

Consider this: You probably work a lot better when your desk isn’t completely covered with a mess of things you don’t need. When you eliminate distractions and waste, it establishes an organized workspace and workflow. This helps you focus on what’s most important, ensuring you work efficiently and effectively.

Here, you’ll learn more about the development of lean, the benefits of lean agile, and the five core principles of lean.

The development of lean agile

Lean agile, or lean software development, originates from the principles of lean manufacturing. The concept was brought into manufacturing to improve profits by reducing costs instead of solely relying on increased sales. If a company can eliminate waste and become more efficient, it can save money, thereby increasing overall profits.

Lean agile is an agile methodology that, in basic terms, is quite simple: improve efficiency by eliminating waste. Unlike traditional, waterfall project management, which dictates a set plan laid out by a project manager, lean agile strives to reduce all tasks and activities that don’t provide real value. This helps ensure everyone involved in a project or product development can work at optimal efficiency.

If you’re looking to dive into the history of lean agile, Lean Enterprise Institute Inc., founded in 1997 by James P. Womack, PhD, is a leading resource for lean methodology. It aims to help people and teams work better through lean thinking and practices.

Lean practices are popular because they can be applied to other agile approaches and software development methods. Lean agile provides a clear application for scaling agile, which is often difficult for large or growing organizations.

The benefits of lean agile

In case you’re not on board with lean agile yet, let’s review its main benefits.

Waste less time

Time is wasted when processes don’t run smoothly. In lean manufacturing, it’s important for goods and services to be delivered quickly and effectively. No one's time should be wasted on the job, and companies should aim for shorter lead times without sacrificing quality.

Wasting time in any industry is expensive, but it’s particularly important to pay attention when working in agile software development. Even a small bottleneck or broken process can completely throw off a workflow or product deadline. Lean agile helps development teams manage time effectively to ensure everyone is utilized, no one's time is wasted, and roadblocks are anticipated in advance.

Reduce costs

When businesses eliminate waste, they save money. In its original form, lean manufacturing ensured companies had the right amount of materials, employees, and working hours at any given time. Overproduction, overhiring, or simply having too many materials to store are expensive wastes that can be eliminated through better management of systems and processes.

Any business, no matter the industry, will save money with improved efficiency. Lean agile ensures that waste is continually eliminated and agile teams continue to fine-tune processes for optimal efficiency.

Improve work quality

With lean agile, it’s not only about efficiency — it's about maintaining efficient processes while bringing a quality product to customers and stakeholders. When businesses intentionally improve processes, they remain competitive. Lean principles consider the customer value of any action or decision to ensure needs are always met or exceeded.

The five principles of lean agile

There are five core principles for implementing lean methodology:

1. Value
2. Value stream
3. Flow
4. Pull
5. Perfection

These principles describe a five-step process that guides the implementation of lean techniques for manufacturing, software development teams, and other agile practicing industries.

1. Identify value

The first step requires you to step into the shoes of the customer. Value is what the customer needs and wants from a specific project or product.

Consider from the customers’ point of view: What are their expectations? What are they willing to pay for? How do they want their needs met?

Sometimes, customers may be unable to define exactly what they’re looking for — especially if it’s a new product or technology they’re unfamiliar with.

In any case, the project cannot move forward without clearly identifying what it will take to provide customer satisfaction. You’ll need to identify the end goal (value) customers are hoping to find with the product or service.

2. Map the value stream

Next, the team visually maps each of the steps and processes it will take to bring the product from inception to delivery. By making each step visible and always keeping the value top-of-mind, it’s easier to see which steps don’t directly contribute to continuous delivery. Once wasteful steps are found, the team finds ways to eliminate those steps or reduce them as much as possible.

Getting rid of waste ensures your company doesn’t unnecessarily spend money on steps and processes that don’t add value. And — most importantly — the customer gets exactly what they’re looking for.

3. Create flow

Once the waste is eliminated from the value stream, the next step is ensuring the remaining processes work as effectively and efficiently as possible, which means no delays, disruptions, or bottlenecks. It’s important for the steps that create value to work in tight sequences to ensure the product flows smoothly toward the customer.

In order to achieve this kind of agile transformation, lean businesses must train their employees to be adaptive and multi-skilled, create cross-functional teams, break down and reconfigure steps in the production, and balance employee workloads.

4. Establish a pull system

With enhanced flow, your team can deliver products and services faster. A pull system enables “just-in-time” manufacturing and delivery, limiting inventory and work in progress (WIP) items by only producing enough to meet customer demand.

By establishing a pull system, you create products and services as needed as opposed to creating them in advance, which leads to a growing inventory or list of tasks that need to be stored and managed — draining your bottom line.

5. Seek perfection

By completing steps 1-4, waste is eliminated — for now. However, the work is never done. There is always a process that could be improved, and there will always be steps in project and product development that waste time and money or don’t deliver value. That’s why the fifth step of seeking perfection is key.

Lean takes time to implement, and going through the process once is not enough. Build a continuous improvement mindset into your company culture, and never settle for the same old.

Lean agile made easy

Lean prioritizes the elimination of waste to improve efficiency. This helps teams continually improve their processes while emphasizing the tasks that bring the most value to customers.

If you’re looking to learn about how agile principles work with other development approaches, we recently covered eight different software development methodologies, including rapid application development, extreme programming (XP), and other agile frameworks.

Easy Agile is dedicated to helping teams improve their processes and agile methods. Our Jira plugins help product owners, Scrum Masters, and development teams align around product goals, workflows, and customer needs. The tools are simple to use, collaborative, flexible, and they work seamlessly with Scrum, Kanban boards, and other agile processes managed in Jira software.

You can contact our team or watch a demo to learn more about our tools and follow our blog for the latest content on Jira, agile, lean, and the development process.

Let's face it! Project management for agile teams can include a lot of tough calls, from managing product owner expectations or undefined quality standards.

Sure, you have good days and bad days. But why not set your sights higher and aim for the ideal day?

To help you do just that, planning poker, also called Scrum poker, uses playing cards to simplify agile estimating and planning. The result? Your agile estimating and planning process runs more smoothly, and your development team increases its productivity.

In this article, you’ll explore the driving force behind planning poker,  how it helps estimation, planning poker’s history, and how to play this game.

The driving force behind planning poker

The purpose of planning poker is engaging the whole team in collaboration. Scrum poker makes it easier to make valuable time and effort estimates so your team can create satisfying deliverables.

Instead of team members verbally expressing their estimates, they use a deck of playing cards to speak for them. Drawing cards and simultaneously placing these playing cards face down eliminates bias. Everyone follows this route in the estimation process, which supports individual estimates and negates peer influence.

Other project estimation techniques use time to determine how long a task will take. Agile estimation uses story points. These story points refer to the level of effort to undertake a task.

In planning poker, the whole team assigns story points to each task. Each story point is a visual representation of the amount of work to be done and the effort that must go into completing each task. This method wins out over time since it is visual and focuses on effort involved instead of time constraints

Work estimation in agile development

The estimation process is vital to team members because it determines how much work will go into each sprint. Dividing the product backlog into bite-sized tasks helps evaluate the workload.

As a Scrum master, you have a difficult role to play. At the end of the ideal day, you want the product owner's user story to be exemplary. Simultaneously, as the Scrum master, you have a Scrum team to manage.

Agile development is a critical process that you need to control. Get the user story and story points right, and you're halfway there. Master the estimation process and sprint planning, and you control the product backlog and retrospective.

Software development teams can either use physical playing cards or software for planning poker. Using software that includes a Jira plugin is vital when you have distributed teams. When you have a Jira plugin, everyone can participate in and streamline the estimation process.

History of planning poker

Software development teams used to use another team-based estimation technique, Wideband Delphi. Although similar to planning poker, it took too much time to reach consensus with this technique.

James Grenning found that Delphi didn't work as a structured estimating approach and came up with the idea of playing poker in 2002. Grenning found that a physical deck of cards was an engaging approach for agile teams to make work estimates. He also found that Scrum poker worked better than Wideband Delphi.

Planning poker is more inclusive. The deck of cards ensures Scrum team participation in work estimates, and everyone must continue to participate until consensus is reached.

In 2002, Mike Cohn developed mountain goat software and stepped in with a deck of digital cards to use in planning poker. Scrum teams can use these digital playing cards from remote locations to improve agile estimating and planning and have some fun along the way.

Let's explore the ins and outs of the poker session and how to play the game.

What Scrum teams need for a poker session

Agile teams need a few essential items for their planning sessions. These items include:

• A deck of cards
• Estimators (the agile team)
• A moderator
• A features list
• An egg timer

Choose your playing cards

In Scrum poker, team members (estimators) each have a deck of cards. They use these playing cards to indicate their high or low estimate on how long each item on the list of features will take to complete. These list features can be the user story, story points, or ideal days to complete sprint planning.

The playing cards the development team use will follow a Fibonacci sequence. This Fibonacci sequence follows the 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 pattern, where each consecutive number is the sum of the two preceding numbers.

Alternatively, team members can use a different deck of cards where the value of each number has a fixed ratio, such as 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 12 and so on.

Different card decks provide adapted sequences, such as 0, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, and 100. Other commercial decks have cards to indicate that the agile team needs a coffee break or an infinity symbol which means that it is impossible to complete a task.

Similarly, team members can adopt a standard deck of cards for Scrum poker. Here, the team members use the Ace, the 2, 3, 5, 8, and the King.

How to play Scrum poker

Every Scrum team will have different goals, but the general sequence for playing planning poker is as follows:

• All team members have their own deck of cards except for the moderator.
• Team members ask the moderator (often the product owner) questions about themes, user stories, story points, product backlogs, agile retrospectives, or whatever else they need for their agile estimating and planning process. Questions typically surround the product owner's acceptance criteria. Questions can include whether the backlog items are complete and what the next best step is to complete the sprint.
• Once the moderator answers the agile team's questions, each team member selects a card estimate. That represents how long they think the work item will take.
• Team members then place their cards, face down, on the table or use a Jira plugin for distributed teams.
• Playing cards are placed face down to prevent anchoring, or influencing each other's evaluations.
• The moderator reveals the Scrum team's cards to view their estimates.
• If team members have a high or low estimate compared to other team members, they need to explain their reasoning. The agile team can ask more questions for clarification. This questioning period is often limited by using an egg timer.
• The process is repeated until the agile team agrees on the estimate of how long it’ll take to complete each user story.
• Agreement is frequently reached on the second or third draw of the playing cards for each work item.

Agile estimation that involves the whole team

Planning poker is an accurate, collaborative, team-building method of estimating the work for each user story.

While you prepare to use planning poker in your next product roadmap planning meeting, consider Easy Agile TeamRhythm. The app helps you group Jira items into themes so stakeholders can easily keep track.

Scrum teams create release plans to support successful product releases. This helps them maintain their focus on the product vision and feature deliverables.

Here, we’ll explore the definition and purpose of agile release planning and its essential template elements.

Find out what goes into creating a planning meeting and how to set your Scrum team up for successful product releases.

What is agile release planning?

Because software projects are unpredictable, release planning helps team members prioritize their workflow. A release plan focuses on getting specific product features ready for the market. It should examine the product scope, the release date for feature completion, and the resources needed for each release.

The development team then looks at the feedback from earlier product iterations to guide their planning. Product owners and Scrum teams get together to discuss the agile release plan. That’s because team members need to understand what level of product functionality must go into their work. They also need to understand work effort to plan their deadlines for each product increment.

Instead of planning for a significant product release, team members divide the project scope into short sprints or iterations. Many Scrum teams use Jira software to help them plan their sprints, as it helps everyone see the project status at any time.

Creating a prioritization list ensures that team members focus on the most vital product versions the Scrum product owner prioritizes.

What is the purpose of the release plan?

Project release planning helps software development teams plan, direct, and release each project in increments to serve the customer experience. Teams often use this methodology for short sprints of product development.

Release planning provides agile and Scrum teams with a solid direction to complete their projects. Team members also use this opportunity to use sprint feedback to create increments that align with the next release’s project roadmap.

Getting the product plan together

Release planning seems complex, but with some foresight, it can be simple. Let’s review each part of the process.

1. Who leads the release plan?

Typically, the product development team takes its lead from the Scrum master or the product owner. During the meeting, this leader will raise questions about the product backlog to ensure that sprint discussions align with the final product.

All the product stakeholders should participate in the release plan to ensure their feedback is taken into consideration. Without input from everyone involved in the product development, the team risks missing out on vital information to keep the product roadmap on track.

2. Agile release plan aspects

While the release plan is meant to be agile, it also follows a strict process to ensure that teams keep the product roadmap in sight.

Agile teams take all the sprint planning discussions and evaluate these to detail new product deliverables. Although most organizations will use various approaches in their release planning process, each sprint review should include the following aspects:

• The agreed product development releases at each stage of the sprint
• A direction for each new product release
• Specific current and future iterations due in each upcoming release
• What features and functionality should accompany the iteration
• Specific task requirements for each feature delivery to meet the release goal

By going through an in-depth release planning process, software development teams harness the value of these sprint meetings. The ability to rapidly change direction as necessary ensures the team releases the best possible product.

This constant iteration in each sprint review is also valuable in the dynamic environment of product development.

This level of planning, combined with an iterative schedule to account for the dynamic nature of software, is what makes Agile product development so valuable.

3. Sprint meeting discussions

Sprint meeting discussions revolve around user stories, product backlog, and product backlog items. Scrum release planning also considers other issues such as dependencies and product functionality. Other aspects that the team speaks about involve the next release and the number of sprints they must complete and deliver.

Essentially, team members must keep the product vision in mind for effective release planning. This vision helps team members isolate minimum market sprint feature batches and their release dates.

Sprint meeting discussions should include:

• Release plan prioritization of impending new product features and functionality
• Evaluation and inclusion of stakeholder feedback for each sprint
• Detailed descriptions of sprint deliverables and whether these fall into the category of product short-term increments or major longer-term releases
• Which product version will be ready for release and the ideal sequence of product releases to achieve each release goal

Development teams build several product versions. After creating these versions, they prioritize them to release the most important ones to users.

Part of the purpose of release planning is to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same product development page. Another element of these sprint planning meetings is to drive ownership and acceptance of the product vision.

Development of the release plan

There are four steps that software development teams follow to create their product plan.

1. Creating the vision

First, you need to define the vision for the product. Creating a clear vision produces a roadmap for the team to follow in each consecutive sprint. This vision should align with market demand and the product owner’s goals.

It also encourages team members to sift through which features they should prioritize. Similarly, the product roadmap helps teams evaluate the resources they need during the sprint review. Product planning also enables teams to be flexible. Planning reviews ensure direction changes to accommodate ongoing increments to achieve overall release goals.

2. Prioritization of the product backlog

After defining the vision, team members focus on prioritizing features in the product backlog. Here, stakeholder inputs must align with the vision to successfully implement user stories. User stories are vital to the process as they provide the background for detailing product features or functionality.

The product manager provides the team with direction at this stage to outline a viable release plan. This release plan must include the product release goals, release dates, and prioritization of user stories.

3. Set the Scrum planning meeting

The next step in the planning meeting is for the stakeholders to review the plan. Team members now have the chance to adjust deliverables in line with the vision.

Everyone must agree to the release plan at this stage before they can move forward to the next release.

Meeting agenda

Setting up a meeting agenda helps manage the release plan. The essential elements of the agenda for the Scrum framework include:

1. Product plan assessment

The Scrum team reviews the product roadmap to ensure that everyone accepts the product vision and goals.

2. Architecture evaluation

With each release, the Scrum team and product owner evaluate the previous sprint’s architecture. They examine the technical details of the product development and discuss any potential problems that can impact the product release.

Scrum teams go over the scope and estimates of their release plan. Team members determine whether their planning includes the risk of technical debt and if they can complete certain task aspects, such as documenting their work to meet deadlines. Stakeholders also review dependencies that can influence the product versions’ functionality.

3. Velocity and iteration assessment

Scrum teams go over previous iterations to review their velocity estimates. They align their estimates with the suggested iteration schedule to ensure they cover all vital elements.

The product manager controls this assessment to ensure points are assigned to user stories. Assessing user stories and assigning points demonstrate the level of effort the team must invest in each iteration. The total number of story points then represents the estimation of release dates for each sprint release.

An iteration schedule is built by the agile team to determine their velocity for the current and subsequent sprints during this assessment.

The team creates the release scope, which includes all the necessary releases. The Scrum master assigns work to each team member, and all the stakeholders agree to the plan before moving to the next step.

4. Agreement on the definition of done

The team members must now discuss what will qualify as the definition of done for each feature release. Team members must consider whether their evaluation of user stories meets all the product owner's acceptance criteria for release. Once they can prove the acceptance criteria are met in their assessment, they will know that a release completion is valid.

The definition of done must confirm that team members have completed all their assigned tasks for the user story. Team members must also record each task so that the product owner can assess their work.

5. Populate the product release schedule

The project manager can now populate and complete the release plan schedule. All stakeholders should be able to access the calendar to track progress. This release plan schedule helps everyone stay focused on product deliverables and release dates.

Get help with your release planning

Agile release planning is a vital part of the software development team’s success. Create a comprehensive agile release plan for minor or major releases, and you make your life simpler for an upcoming release.

Focus on the release plan calendar helps keep product owners and team members aware of the overall product vision.

Most Scrum teams can use a little help in creating their release plans. At Easy Agile, we offer Jira software that helps Scrum teams execute their release plans to perfection.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm supports collaborative release planning in Jira. The highly-visual story map format transforms the flat Jira backlog into a meaningful picture of work, making it easier to manage your backlog and plan your release.

The notable quote from Alistair Cockburn, co-author of the Agile Manifesto, reads, “A user story is to a use case as a gazelle is to a gazebo.” This sheds light on the immense differences between use cases vs. user stories for agile teams. They may sound similar in name, but they are very different and often used in completely different industries.

While both use cases and user stories help teams plan work and determine what’s needed to complete work, the format for how they are used is quite different. User stories are simple, short descriptions from the customer’s perspective. They are the beginning of a larger process that describes a customer's actions as they use or interact with your product. Use cases contain much more context. Creating detailed use cases is a much more in-depth process that’s designed to help teams understand how a user or customer interacts with a system. We’ll dig deeper into both of these processes below.

If you’re in agile software development, chances are you’re more familiar with utilizing user stories. In this post, we’ll dig deeper into use cases vs. user stories differences, including why today’s development teams have migrated towards user stories and why there’s still valid reason for utilizing use cases in the development process.

What’s the difference between use cases vs. user stories?

Use cases vs. user stories: What’s the difference, and how do you decide what’s best for your team and development process?

Use case vs. user story: Past and present

Use cases were the standard for many years, and they were often used in business analysis, systems analysis, software requirements, and iterative development. With the rise of agile, software projects began to favor user stories in place of use cases because they allowed for improved incremental thinking and agility.

What is a use case?

A use case is a description of each of the ways a user may want to interact with a system, a device, or a piece of equipment. They describe how the system design will respond to requests from its end-user, commonly known as an actor. These actors could be human beings or other systems.

Take an online shopping site and a food delivery service, for example. A customer placing an order or checking if a restaurant is open are two different use cases. Or, on the less technical side, consider a toaster. Say someone (the actor) only wants their bagel toasted on one side. Choosing the “bagel” toaster setting is a use case.

Use cases help teams structure all of the different functional requirements and determine the scope of the project — which means they’re full of details.

These details include:

• The goal of the use case
• Whether the actor is a human or another system
• Preconditions, or the state the system has to be in for the use case to occur
• The regular series of steps the system will take
• Alternative paths the system could take
• Postconditions — actions the system takes at the end of the use case or the various states the system could be in after the use case concludes

Take the “bagel” setting on a toaster.

• Use case title/goal: Bagel setting
• Actor/user: This is someone who likes their bagel only toasted on one side.
• Preconditions: There needs to be a “bagel” function/button.
• Regular steps/standard path: The actor cuts their bagel in half and places each half in the toaster. They push the lever down to toast the bagel. Then, they press the button titled “BAGEL” and wait for their bagel to be toasted the way they like.
• Alternative paths: The actor may forget to activate the “bagel” setting, resulting in a poor user experience.
• Postconditions: The toaster returns to its usual state (bagel setting not set).

What is a user story?

A user story is the who, what, and why of a goal or outcome that the user or customer wants to achieve. It’s the smallest piece of work that can give value back to the customer. It’s written from the point of view of the end user, often on an index card.

Here’s an example of how a user story is typically written: “As a [persona type], I want to [action] so that [benefit].”

A user story is designed to be as simple as possible, sparing the team as well as stakeholders from having to decode a lot of technical lingo. But, that doesn’t mean the process for creating a user story is easy. A lot of information is condensed into a single sentence. And before writing a user story, the team first has to identify and create their user persona and assemble all of the product requirements

Easy Agile co-founder Nick Muldoon describes user story mapping as “a facilitated, curated conversation that brings everyone along for the journey.”

A project or product developed in an agile environment will involve a lot of user stories that are each added to the product backlog. There, they can be arranged and prioritized on a user story map according to the scheduled release or sprint.

Use cases vs. user stories: The case for use cases

While use cases are far less common in agile development, they do have some advantages to consider. After all, the true spirit of agile means questioning your assumptions and trying new methods.

1. Use cases provide a summary and planning skeleton

Use cases provide anyone involved, such as managers, leadership, product owners, developers, or stakeholders, with a summary of what the system will offer. What will the system contribute to the users and the overall business? They provide a planning skeleton to help teams prioritize, estimate timing, and execute actions.

2. Use cases provide context for each requirement

The use case provides enough detail and context to ensure everyone is on the same page. It’s an agreement between team members about what the system will and won’t do.

3. Use cases provide a look ahead at what could slow work

The alternative paths portion of use cases provides an advanced look at what could go wrong. Small bottlenecks can take up a huge amount of time and money, so the sooner you can recognize and address these issues, the better.

4. Use cases provide answers for specific issues and scenarios

Use cases answer the specific questions developers or programmers could have along the way. The use case process ensures all questions about issues or possible scenarios are answered at the outset before these questions begin to bog down work or slow down a team’s progress.

5. Use cases provide a model to think through all aspects completely

The use case model ensures developers have fully thought through all aspects of development. Use cases dig into the details of user needs, system goals, possible issues, and various business variants.

Use cases vs. user stories: Bottom line

So, use cases vs. user stories? How do you decide which is better for your team? If you have a lot of experience with agile projects and working on agile teams, you know the undeniable value of user stories. They convey what the user or customer wants to achieve so that teams are always considering the needs of the user.

That said, even though use cases are a bit dated, they can provide much-needed context surrounding how a system is used. They describe how a user interacts with a system, answering many questions in advance to help manage complicated processes. Plus, it wouldn’t be very agile to discount a solution simply because you haven’t tried it before. 😉

Using Easy Agile TeamRhythm

We’re passionate about building tools that help agile teams work better together. Easy Agile TeamRhythm is designed to help product owners and development teams bring value to customers fast and frequently. Supporting user story mapping, backlog refinement, sprint planning, and team retrospectives, you can plan and manage your work right from the user story map, then come together as a team to share actionable insights that will help you work better together each time.

TeamRhythm integrates seamlessly with your agile boards in Jira for both Scrum and Kanban methodologies. Try it yourself in our sandbox demonstration; no need for a login or installation.

Storytelling is an excellent way to describe anything because stories conjure detailed images. Once you create a visual association, cognitive processes leap into action to make the story in the user journey map a reality that is easy to track.

This is what the customer journey map (CJM) is all about—epic storytelling that involves comprehensive planning to capture the design process and deliver a unique customer experience.

Creating a customer journey map (also called the user journey map) involves planning a project from the user’s point of view and using personas, epics, features, user stories, and tasks. This visualization process also involves several stakeholders as user personas on the road to planning perfection.

By the end of the project, your CJM should help achieve business goals and exceed customer expectations with enough touchpoints along the way to motivate satisfaction. The process is a little like rubbing Aladdin's lamp to manifest your deepest wishes.

What is the user journey map?

In contrast to the flat backlog, the customer journey map makes the vision for your project come alive in real-time. You get to use creative storytelling to generate a magical customer experience through visual representations.

Project team members accomplish this by developing an empathy map to an almost-perfect plan from the customer’s perspective. User journey mapping captures the customer’s emotional state, which helps identify touchpoints and pain points. Teams then use these points to elevate the customer experience.

Unlike rubbing a genie’s lamp for results, you get to use convenient software to develop a service blueprint where design thinking reflects a shared vision between stakeholders.

The starting point is to anticipate customer interactions with the mobile app or other e-commerce project development story. That’s why user research is another vital element in developing the customer journey map template.

This customer journey map template should also draw valuable information from the empathy map and the experience map. An in-depth understanding of the KPIs and metrics that go into storytelling helps direct product usability through appreciating customer interactions with the product.

Customer interactions generate feedback, which leads to understanding customer's needs. Additional touchpoints can then be included or modified to build on the overall project outcomes.

Essentially, you use hierarchical storytelling on a magical customer journey map template to meet real-life expectations that resonate with the customer experience.

The customer journey mapping hierarchy

When beginning the journey to create the ideal customer experience, team members should visualize the project from the user’s current state. Once you capture the essence of the current customer perspective, you can better understand what needs to change and improve.

A simple example may be a travel app that encompasses services such as travel agent services, flight bookings, and accommodation in a geographical area (present state). The client wants to create a future state app which contains tourist activities to augment the customer experience. The basic process will then look like this:

For app customers who want a value-add experience with our travel app which is a helpful resource that provides tips on local tourist activities.

Your user journey map hierarchy involves four building blocks to meet customers’ needs:

1. Understanding user personas or buyer personas
2. Developing themes and epics to address touchpoints
3. Using steps or features to support epics and the narrative flow
4. The stories in the customer journey map

1. Understand user personas or buyer personas

The user journey map starts with defining the user personas or buyer personas as vital stakeholders in project development. These customer personas represent the top of the hierarchy, which is the starting point of the customer journey map.

A detailed visual reflection of the user persona is vital to getting your final product right. To deliver this, you need to walk through the story mapping journey from the customer’s perspective. This helps avoid the nasty consequences of inadequate planning that results in sub-optimum deliverables and unhappy teams and customers.

To understand user personas, you need to identify the various potential touchpoints in the journey and customer pain points through use cases and feedback. You’ll need to anticipate as many potential scenarios as possible from the buyer persona’s perspective.

Although the “who,” “what,” and “why” are instrumental in defining the user story, it all begins with visualizing user personas and thinking about customer behaviors, demographics, needs, and goals.

Once you define who your customer personas are, you can follow up with themes and epics to deliver on customer expectations. The epics are the heroes or heroines in this story visualization method.

2. Develop themes and epics to address touchpoints

The customer journey map positions epics at the top of the storyboard because they are vital to creating a great project.

Team leaders must consult with the client and relevant stakeholders to develop an overarching project theme, to translate into epics. Epics flow through this theme from left to right. These epics show large bodies of work broken down into smaller features which can meet continuous delivery value.

Epics are also strategic directives that begin with the current state of an issue and move the situation into a desirable future state. This epic future state is built on tactics, or features and tasks, which team members use to clarify project requirements and move toward that magical future state of project success.

Before team members can move forward, they need to get the epics right. Epics cover three fundamental foundations: user persona, product, and design requirements, which reflect visually on the user journey map.

The epics should meet several foundational requirements:

• Follow through by aligning the overall business goals with detailed buyer personas and demographics
• Broadly outline the user persona’s needs
• Meet specific customer needs by addressing touchpoints and pain points
• Include specific functions, features, and benefits
• Produce a future state ideal project

After designing your heroic epics to cover the project's primary goals, you can start breaking these into steps that integrate with the overall narrative flow of the user story.

3. Use epics for highlighting the narrative flow

Once you clearly define your epics, it’s time to generate narrower steps or features.

As your epics move from left to right, you must define each of the necessary steps to accomplish business goals. This customizable process uses epics to relay the user journey over the project duration to reflect project outcomes.

The customer journey map template also forms the basis of the ideal user story as you transition from epics to features. The features originate from the epics, which is why the epics are the heroes in this story. They “save” customers with excellent planning and deliverables.

At its most basic level, features should include the following elements:

• Deliverables that add value and support epics completion
• Generate business value by considering KPIs, metrics, customer acquisition, and retention
• Demonstrate sufficient definition for team members to follow through on time estimates and complete tasks within one to three sprints
• Team members must be able to test the results of their features
• Establish test criteria for each feature to set acceptable quality standards that meet customer expectations before moving to the next step

In short, the user acceptance criteria (UAC) in the user journey map should include a brief item value description, a feature benefit explanation, and the feature quality completion points that team members must achieve.

Only once you nail these details can you tell the user stories from the customer's perspective. Similarly, only once you complete these three fundamental building blocks in the customer journey map can you focus on user stories and business goals that include customer satisfaction and retention.

4. Begin storytelling through the user journey map

After the third step in the hierarchy of the user journey map, the actual user stories begin. This is the final step in design thinking related to the visualization of epics into manageable stories and tasks.

To state the buyer persona case, team members must understand the “who,” “what,” and “why” of the customer experience. Understanding and defining the customer personas forms the basis of user story creation, enabling delivery of the most acceptable product possible.

Developing the best story relies on creating user stories that highlight the customer experience and use cases that highlight the finer details of system performance.

In the story creation phase, team members assume the customer’s perspective to define requests. Team members can consider exploring social media to understand customer behavior and experiences to use as story inputs. User stories can also include enabler tasks to augment feature completion.

Team members typically write their user stories to complete these in short sprints. Sprint completion involves task completion for release before completing one epic and moving to the next, except where concurrent work is possible.

Ultimately, the user journey map must tell the customer’s story of how their need will be met by creating or modifying a product, process, service, or system feature. New developments must follow through on the formula of “as a…” “I want…” “so that...”

As a new Agile team member, I want to understand my and other team member's roles so that I am clear about my tasks and the responsibilities of other team members.

After generating user stories, team members can break tasks into even smaller parts to facilitate work deliverables and reduce potential churn that negatively impacts customer retention.

As the user journey map progresses, the stories should clearly outline the activities for completion, always linking these back to buyer persona goals. The smaller, granular tasks then relate to user behaviors, and the outcomes link to each step of the process to reinforce what deliverables will meet customer needs within set timeframes.

During the customer journey map, stories can be split further to accomplish greater clarity.

Bottom line: The customer journey map

Through the customer journey mapping process, you should capture the primary epics of the user journey in the story map visualization.

You will need to develop the user story map holistically and interrupt it with additions and subtractions in an iterative fashion. This iterative user story mapping process helps minimize churn as you continue to update your story as you move forward.

Once the project is done, you need to test the product on potential customers, gather customer feedback, and improve the user journey map.

The benefits of carefully planning the customer experience through a visual format are exponential.

Tell your project story with Easy Agile User Story Maps for Jira

The customer journey should highlight the ideal user experience. To do this, the user story map should incorporate the project from user personas to achieve stories with valuable touchpoints as markers along the way.

Once the visual representation is done, it should validate the service blueprint for the customer journey mapping process through the current and future states of the project.

Throughout the project, your team should create a unique user journey that delivers the ultimate customer experience and exceeds customer expectations.

Try Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Personas today to make your customers' stories come alive with magic.

We’re off to the races! 🏃🏃‍♀️ Sprints are a key component of agile methodology. A sprint is a predefined time period in which agile teams work together towards an agreed-upon sprint goal. There are four types of agile meetings that occur over the course of a sprint, and each is vital to ensuring the success of the agile process. It’s all about sprinting through a predetermined amount of work to get to the finish line, where you learn from your process and begin the race again (only better off because of what you learned during the previous sprint).

Agile meetings are used to get team members, leaders, and stakeholders on the same page, and they guide the process of an agile sprint or Scrum.

This post will cover the four key agile meetings, which include sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives. Plus, we’ll discuss a bonus agile meeting that’s utilized for backlog refinement.

Agile meetings vs. Scrum meetings

Scrum is an agile methodology that’s most commonly used in software development. Scrum meetings are technically a type of agile meeting, but they have more specific parameters designed to fit within the Scrum framework. The process revolves around a 2-4 week sprint involving a product owner, Scrum Master, and the entire Scrum team.

We covered Scrum meetings (ceremonies) in detail in another article. For the purposes of this post, we’ll focus on the four main agile meeting types. These processes and best practices can be applied across multiple agile methodologies, including Scrum and Kanban. This framework can also be applied across industries beyond software development and can adapt to the needs of most teams.

Simply put: Scrum has a more rigid framework that follows four ceremonies/meetings. The agile process is much the same, with four very similar meetings, but there’s more flexibility to adjust the time frame of the sprint and adapt the process when not following Scrum guidelines specifically. Okay, maybe that’s still not simply put, but it wouldn’t be agile if it was linear and straightforward.

The 4 types of agile meetings

There are four central agile meetings: sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospective meetings. A sprint starts with a sprint planning meeting. Each day, a daily standup meeting is held. Finally, at the end of the sprint, a sprint review and retrospective are held. The process repeats with new springs until the product, project, or work is complete.

1. Sprint planning meeting

The sprint planning meeting occurs at the beginning of a sprint and involves the entire team. In sprint planning, the entire team meets to discuss and agree upon which work tasks (backlog items) should be moved to the sprint backlog — the items that need to be completed by the end of the sprint. During the meeting, sprint goals are determined, and the team aligns on expectations.

Without a sprint planning meeting to outline the sprint backlog (tasks that need to be completed), the team will waste time during the sprint trying to determine which work takes precedent.

Sprint planning mistakes to avoid:

• Starting planning without a refined backlog
• Not being on the same page as your stakeholders
• Ignoring the customer and the customer journey when making plans
• Creating a rigid plan that doesn’t have room to grow or adapt
• Using bland, flat product maps that lack critical context
• Failing to incorporate retrospective insights in the following planning session

Learn more about common agile planning mistakes and how your development team can avoid these pitfalls.

2. Daily standup meeting

The daily standup meeting occurs every day of the sprint. In the Scrum process, this meeting might also be called the daily Scrum meeting. It’s a chance for the team to connect about the work that was completed the previous day and what each person or team plans to complete over the course of the next 24 hours.

The meeting aims to answer three important questions:

• What work was completed since the last standup to help the team reach the sprint goal?
• What work do you plan to complete today?
• Is there anything currently in your way or hindering your progress?

This is a good time to address any bottlenecks. If work planned from the previous day wasn’t completed, what caused the delay, and how can the team work together to solve any problems keeping the work from moving forward?

A standup meeting is short and to the point so everyone can get back to the work they hope to complete. So short that it’s often recommended participants stand for the duration of the meeting. Hence the name daily standup. It includes all team members and ideally takes place at the same time every day to ensure everyone can always attend.

Daily standup mistakes to avoid:

• Not keeping track of the time during the meeting
• Continually going over the allotted meeting time
• Rambling participants who aren’t prepared to answer the meeting’s key questions
• Skipping the meeting due to lack of time
• Team members showing up late to the meeting or missing it altogether
• Allowing the loudest voices to overshadow the rest of the team
• Letting someone state the same task on multiple consecutive days
• Failing to address potential bottlenecks
• Assigning work beyond a person's capacity

3. Sprint review meeting

The sprint review is an opportunity for the team to showcase the work they accomplished during the sprint. This meeting might be an internal presentation or a more formal demo to stakeholders, depending on the needs of the project and how far along work is.

Sprint review mistakes to avoid:

• Not properly preparing for the meeting or demonstration
• Not bringing stakeholders in on your process
• Failing to demonstrate how the work brings value to the customer
• Exaggerating or embellishing successes
• Failing to address any problems and how they were solved
• Not incorporating sprint review feedback into the next sprint planning meeting

4. Sprint retrospective meeting

The retrospective is a crucial part of the agile process. The meeting comes at the end of the sprint, bringing the entire team together to assess their processes and discuss how they can improve next time.

Which aspects of the sprint went well, and what can you learn from that success? What didn’t go so well, and what bottlenecks did the team hit? What could be done better next time? Since agile is all about learning and iterating, there are lessons to be learned after each sprint. Everything from the good to the bad to the mediocre can be transformed into actionable improvements.

Retrospective mistakes to avoid:

• Blaming individual team members for bottlenecks
• Allowing only the loudest voices to provide insight
• Failing to empower the softer voices in the room
• Repeating the same questions over and over without changing things up
• Allowing the retrospective to run too long (aim for two hours for a two-week sprint)
• Skipping a retrospective due to a lack of time or resources
• Forgetting about or not including stakeholder insights or needs
• Failing to improve upon the sprint retrospective process (retrospective the retrospective!)
• Failing to incorporate retrospective insights in the next sprint

Bonus: Backlog refinement meeting

It could be argued that there’s a fifth agile meeting, especially in the product development world. Before the sprint planning meeting, the product owner must create a product backlog, which comprises all of the tasks and items the team needs to complete in order to fully develop the end product or project. The items include user stories, bug fixes, features, and other tasks that must be addressed to achieve the end goal.

Backlog refinement prepares the backlog for sprint planning by ordering items to deliver the most impact over the next sprint. During backlog refinement, a product owner ensures that product backlog items contain enough information, detail, and prioritization for the team to make smart decisions about what to tackle when.

A meeting to refine the backlog may occur before sprint planning begins, depending on the current state of the product backlog. Outside of the product development industry, the product backlog might be akin to a master project task list.

Backlog refinement meeting mistakes to avoid:

• Not completing backlog refinement in time for sprint planning
• Leaving too much backlog refinement for the planning meeting
• Failing to prioritize items that provide customer value
• Not incorporating new stakeholder feedback, questions, and concerns

Agile meetings: Final review

So there you have it! The four key agile meetings are sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives, with an honorable mention going out to backlog refinement.

Let’s review each meeting’s purpose:

• Sprint planning gets everyone on the same page about what needs to be accomplished over the course of the coming sprint.
• Daily standups ensure the team stays on track and helps them address and resolve any potential bottlenecks.
• Sprint reviews are an opportunity for the team to showcase the work accomplished during the sprint to stakeholders and receive critical feedback.
• Sprint retrospectives allow the team to come together to discuss what went well, what didn’t go well, and how they can improve next time.
• Backlog refinement prepares the backlog for sprint planning in order to deliver the most impact over the next sprint.

Hold effective agile meetings with Easy Agile

Easy Agile is committed to helping teams work better with agile. Easy Agile builds products specifically designed for Jira users to help agile teams work more efficiently and effectively.

We regularly publish lists of tools, advice articles, and how-to guides for agile teams. If you work with Jira, you’ll find our resources are especially helpful in navigating the ins and outs of product development and the Jira apps that will improve the way your team collaborates.

Teams who are building products or completing projects necessarily rely on each other. Identifying and keeping track of dependencies can be difficult, particularly across multiple teams or external or shared teams. Dependencies management is often something that can be taken for granted as part of a standard operating procedure. In this article, we will look more closely at the process of identifying, troubleshooting and resolving any dependencies that prevent work from being delivered.

A common example is if one piece of working software depends on an external plugin or third party tool. If that plugin fails to operate, then the working software may fail as well. Similarly, large organizations working on multiple pieces of software at once may have habitual or recurring dependencies between different teams in order to operate. This is why agile teams need processes to monitor dependencies so they won’t disrupt development or inhibit flow.

The more complex dependencies become, ironically, the more simple a process you need to manage them at scale. Complexity compounds complexity, so finding an approach whether it is a tool or a framework that works within the context of your teams and your organization is the key to unlocking dependency management in a sustainable way.

Let’s take a closer look at how you may approach managing dependencies within your organization.

Similarly, agile frameworks such as LeSS and SAFe can help with dependencies management in large organizations. Finally, finding ways to visualize the dependencies in an organization is a highly effective way to mitigate the risks of delaying projects.

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Want to empower your teams to manage their dependencies?

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Now, close your eyes and imagine the rest. Just kidding, read on...as if your agility depends on it. 😂

Types of dependencies in project management

Before we discuss tools and frameworks, let's outline a few different types of dependencies:

• Direct dependency: This common dependency type is one where one project or feature depends on the delivery of another.
• Transitive dependencies: This is where we have an indirect connection between two projects, usually by way of a connecting project. For example, Feature A depends on Feature B, and Feature B depends on Feature C. Therefore, Feature A indirectly depends on Feature C.
• External dependencies: These dependencies can be out of the remit of your team, group of teams or organization. It helps to be aware of them and it is worth identifying them separately as the addressing of these dependencies may be outside of the scope of the team or group level ceremonies.

Let’s dive in now to some frameworks for a blueprint of how to approach this.

Agile frameworks for organizations to improve dependency management

You're probably familiar with the most common agile frameworks for software development — Kanban and Scrum. These frameworks are mostly suited for individual team organizations. But what about frameworks for cross-functional agile teams in a large organization who need help with dependencies management?

LeSS for dependency management

LeSS is a framework that helps multiple Scrum teams who are working together on a single project to scale. Think of LeSS as Scrum at a large enterprise scale — you still have a single product backlog, a product owner, a Scrum master, and software developers. But the key difference is that there are many teams working towards the same goal and the same definition of done (rather than a single team).

One of the most important tasks for the product owner role in the LeSS framework is making sure that dependency information is provided across teams. In LeSS, product backlog refinement (PBR) is an organized event that makes sure dependency risks are consistently identified. PBR allows multiple teams to plan sprints in parallel and to identify if there are any cross-team dependencies that risk project completion.

SAFe approach to managing dependencies

The SAFe (Scaled Agile framework) provides principles and workflow patterns to guide organizations through their dependencies. SAFe promotes transparency and alignment across large organizations so they can be more nimble in meeting their business objectives. Being able to respond to changes quickly can be hindered by size and scale. Dependencies can often tangle work and trip up teams due to the inability to see and appreciate cross-functional team dependencies.

Just as scrum has ceremonies to keep a single agile team aligned, an essential ceremony to keep multiple teams aligned and communicating with each other according to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is Program Increment / Planning Interval Planning - better known as PI Planning. During PI Planning, teams create their dependencies and through cross-functional collaboration can adjust their plans to manage these dependencies.

Unlike startups, who are small and can typically make organizational changes quickly, large organizations often become too big to make rapid changes. One common cause of this is the inability to manage dependency resolution because dependencies are less visible for cross-functional teams.

Just as Scrum has ceremonies to keep a single agile team aligned, an essential ceremony to keep multiple teams in the Scaled Agile Framework communicating with each other is Program Increment (PI) Planning. It’s a way to keep even the largest organizations nimble.

One key output of PI Planning is the program (dependency) board or ART planning board (SAFe 6.0).

Easy Agile Programs: Equip your remote, distributed or co-located teams for success with a digital tool for PI Planning.

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PI Planning for large organizations

PI Planning is a periodic ceremony that happens throughout the year. Teams within an organization gather to compile their thoughts on product features and the product roadmap, and to discover any dependencies that exist between them.

One key feature of PI Planning is an ART planning board (program board). ART planning boards help give Agile Release Trains (ART) — a group of agile teams working together on a common goal — a visual representation of what the teams have planned to complete from their PI Planning.

Visualize your dependencies

Easy Agile Programs for Jira is a complete tool for dependencies management at a program level. By utilizing visualizations and by providing transparency across projects, teams can confidently scale without the risk of unforeseen dependencies and disruptions. It does this by providing three views:

• Program roadmap: an overview of all of the scheduled increments or iterations for a program or group of teams
• Program Board (ART Planning Board): an at-a-glance visualization of all of the teams within a program, including all of their cross-team dependencies
• Team planning board: where teams break down committed features for the upcoming increment, create dependencies with other teams, estimate and schedule their work.

Visualise dependencies with Easy Agile Programs: Filter the Program Board by at risk, healthy or blocked dependencies for effective conversations.

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Unlock your organization's common dependencies

Managing dependencies comes first from being able to see what you need to manage and then to be able to focus where is needed. As a highly visual and filterable tool, Easy Agile Programs can support in many ways:

• Highly visual dependencies: The color of the dependency lines reflects their health status. A red dependency represents a conflict, yellow indicates at risk, green signifies a healthy state and black indicates external dependencies outside the current view, such as work in the backlog or in an other Program Increments. The colours support product managers, release train engineers or scrum masters to know where to focus. To avoid bottlenecks, you need to address the red dependencies and the yellow where possible.
• Team alignment to each other and business outcomes: Adding in third level hierarchy issues to capture and communicate higher level business initiative or priorities helps teams to understand the context of the bigger picture and why they are delivering what is scheduled. Making sure that all of your ART or group of teams work is represented and visible on a board that is always up to date helps keep teams aligned.
• Focus mode: Alignment needs to be maintained beyond planning. With a number of filters applicable to the program board to focus on teams, epic or issue status, dependency health or initiative, it is easy to focus the work - and conversations - on what is most important.

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The sprint planning meeting helps agile teams plan and get on the same page about each sprint. It’s an opportunity to decide on prioritization based on the product vision, issue urgency, stakeholder feedback, and knowledge from the previous sprint.

The goal of the meeting is to determine which backlog items should be tackled during the upcoming sprint. The team, guided by the product owner and Scrum Master, decide which items from the product backlog should be moved to the sprint backlog for hopeful completion over the coming weeks (sprint duration).

Sprint planning plays a critical role in the Scrum process. The meeting ensures teams enter a sprint prepared, with work items chosen carefully. The end result should be a shared understanding of sprint goals that will guide the next sprint.

While sprint planning should occur before any type of sprint, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on sprint planning sessions for Scrum teams. Continue reading to learn our top tips for a successful sprint planning meeting. 🎉

How does the sprint planning meeting fit into the Scrum framework?

Scrum is a hugely popular agile methodology used in product development. The process involves a series of sprints that are improved upon and adjusted based on continual feedback from customers, stakeholders, and team members.

The sprint planning meeting sees the entire team comes together to decide what work they hope to complete over the upcoming sprint. The product owner helps decide which priority product backlog items move to the sprint backlog. This is an incredibly important phase that guides the team’s goals over the next two weeks.

The Scrum Master acts as a Scrum guide. They help the development team stay on track in each sprint, ensuring everyone gets the most out of the process. The Scrum team works together to complete the amount of work decided on during sprint planning. To ensure everyone remains on track and on the same page, daily stand-ups are held each day. This provides an opportunity for team members to address any issues or potential bottlenecks that could keep work from running smoothly.

Following the sprint, a sprint review takes place, which gives stakeholders an opportunity to provide feedback. Finally, a sprint retrospective meeting gives the team an opportunity to assess and improve upon their process. The Scrum concludes and begins again with another sprint planning meeting.

Here are some tips to make sure each sprint planning meeting sets you up for success:

1. Reserve the same time for sprint planning ⏰

Book your sprint planning meeting on the same day and at the same time every two weeks to ensure your entire team keeps that time slot available. Sprint planning is vital to the success of each sprint — it’s a meeting that shouldn’t be shuffled around.

Pick a time that works for everyone involved, asking for feedback from your team about when is best. Schedule the meetings well in advance in everyone's calendar so that no one forgets about it or books other engagements.

2. Set a sprint planning meeting duration and stick to it ⏳

Sprint planning is important, but that doesn’t mean it should take forever. Set a time limit for your meeting, and do your best to stick to it. If you are well prepared with an agenda and refined backlog, you should be able to get straight to planning.

We recommend scheduling no more than 2-4 hours for sprint planning. Let the Scrum Master be in charge of ensuring the team stays on track and completes planning in the allotted time.

3. Complete backlog refinement before sprint planning begins 📝

Complete your backlog refinement ahead of your sprint planning meeting. Otherwise, you will spend far too much time adding details, estimating, or splitting work.

The sprint planning meeting should be reserved for planning and goal setting. While the backlog shouldn’t be set in stone, it should provide team members with enough details to move forward with planning instead of refinement.

4. Incorporate stakeholder feedback from the sprint review 😍

What insights did stakeholders share throughout the sprint or during the sprint review? You are designing this product for them, so incorporating their feedback is crucial to the end result.

Make sure every decision is based on customer needs. After each sprint, share your product goals and sprint goals with your stakeholders and adjust per their feedback.

5. Incorporate sprint retrospective insights 💡

Sprint retrospectives are a critical part of the agile process, providing a time for the team to discuss how they can improve. There are lessons to be learned every time you complete a sprint or iteration. Agile continually takes what a team learns and turns those experiences into actionable improvements. So, ignoring these lessons would be very un-agile of you. 🤔

How did the last sprint go? Was each team member satisfied with the process, and what was accomplished? What changes did your team decide would make the next sprint more effective? Use these insights to make each sprint better than the last one.

6. Clearly define what success looks like ✅

Set clearly defined goals, objectives, and metrics. What is the definition of done? How will the team know if they are successful? You should leave the sprint planning meeting with a clear idea of what needs to get done and what success looks like.

7. Use estimates to make decisions based on team capacity 📈

Overloading your team or any individual beyond their capacity does far more harm than good. The team will be more likely to make mistakes, and morale will diminish as goals remain consistently out of reach.

Use agile estimation techniques and story points to better understand workload and capacity. How much work and effort is needed to accomplish your goals? Ensure you set realistic and reasonable goals based on your best estimations.

8. Align sprint goals with overall product goals 🎉

Ensure you have a goal for the sprint and that all backlog items relate to the end goal. Your sprint goals should work alongside your overall product goals.

Failing to prioritize your objectives can result in a random selection of to-dos. Completing disconnected backlog items will still get work done, but it will result in unexpected outcomes and a low sense of accomplishment for the team. Each backlog item should be chosen with a clear purpose that relates to your product and sprint goals.

9. Leave room for flexibility 💫

Any agile methodology is flexible by nature, and Scrum is no exception. If there isn’t room for flexibility, something has gone seriously wrong.

It's important to acknowledge that not everything will always go to plan. You will continually find new information, stakeholder insights, and dependencies that the team will need to adjust to along the way. Ensure the team understands they need to be flexible and that they are supported throughout each sprint.

Sprint planning made easy

The effectiveness of sprint planning can make or break the coming week for a Scrum team. It’s important for the development team to take the necessary time to prepare for each upcoming sprint. This means going into the meeting with clear goals, objectives, stakeholder feedback, and a refined backlog.

Make the most of your sprint planning and do it with ease using Easy Agile TeamRhythm. Transform your flat product maps into dynamic, flexible, and visual representations of the customer journey. Story points will help your team make decisions and account for capacity while keeping the customer top-of-mind.

Learn more about the benefits of user story mapping and read our ultimate guide to user story maps.

Jira is the #1 software development tool used by agile teams. It’s designed to help development teams plan, track, and release awesome products. With Jira Software, teams can work within multiple different frameworks, including Kanban and Scrum, while gaining access to agile reporting, integrations, and automations.

It’s completely versatile, so teams can work in whatever way best suits them. Plus, Jira Software is designed to help teams continuously improve their performance. This agile project management and agile software development tool is available in three different packages:

• Jira Core: The basic Jira platform
• Jira Software: Jira Core plus additional Agile functions
• Jira Service Desk: Service experience delivery

In this post, we’ll focus on all of the features available for teams using Jira Software. We’ll cover what’s included and how your team can make the most of Jira Software features and add ons.

Jira Software Scrum boards

Jira Software is designed to work within various agile frameworks. The Scrum process helps devops teams bring iterative and incremental value to stakeholders and customers.

One Scrum is usually made up of a two-week sprint that aims to complete a specific set of backlog items from the product backlog. Product owners plan sprints, and a Scrum Master guides the development team through the various stages of the Scrum.

The team works to complete the most important work while meeting for daily standups to review their progress and any potential roadblocks. The daily standup allows teams to learn on the go and use an iterative and customizable approach.

Jira Scrum boards unite teams around a single goal while promoting iterative, incremental delivery. The tool provides data-driven Scrum insights so that product owners and team members can keep track of sprint goals and improve retrospectives. Jira’s customization helps teams deliver consistent value to stakeholders quickly and effectively based on ever-evolving customer feedback.

With Jira Scrum boards, you can:

• Build a single source of truth for all of the work that needs to be completed
• View your progress visually during the development cycle
• Provide all team members with a clear view of what’s on their plate
• Quickly identify any blockers or potential blockers
• Organize work around the sprint time frame
• Avoid over-committing on work at any given time
• Don’t lose track of key dates or milestones.
• Utilize key metrics, including burndown charts and velocity reports

Jira Software Kanban boards

Image credit: Atlassian

Kanbans provide workflow transparency for development teams by establishing a visual representation of what needs to be done, what’s in progress, and what’s been completed. They also help teams understand their capacity so they can focus on one key task at a time. Work to be completed moves from one column to the next — from To Do to In Progress to Done.

Jira Kanban boards provide a framework for teams to continuously and efficiently deliver work. They are simple to use, visually engaging, and completely customizable to the specific needs of the team. Jira Kanban board columns can be customized based on other requirements, such as In Review or Waiting for Client Feedback.

With Jira Kanban boards, you can:

• Clearly visualize workflows
• Depict work at distinct stages
• Build a single source of truth for all of the work that needs to be completed
• View an at-a-glance summary of where work stands
• Capture relevant information for Jira issues, tasks, stories, or bug tracking
• Limit the amount of work-in-progress
• Prevent bottlenecks and spot them before they delay work
• Configure workflows to be as simple or as complex as needed
• Customize boards based on the needs of the team
• Utilize real-time visual metrics

Jira Software roadmaps

Roadmaps help agile teams see the big picture surrounding the development of a product. They establish a flexible plan for what the team hopes to accomplish and provide a visual of how all of the pieces connect.

Even though the roadmap lays out a clear view of the road ahead, it’s not a set-in-stone plan of what’s to come. The agile methodology and nature of roadmaps mean they are constantly updated and fine-tuned based on new information that continually flows in from team members, stakeholders, and customers.

Jira roadmaps are available to teams and organizations through Jira Software Premium. They help teams track progress based on the big picture to predict capacity and avoid bottlenecks.

With Jira roadmaps, you can:

• Sketch the big picture
• Map and account for dependencies
• Track your progress
• Account for team bandwidth
• View capacity on a sprint-by-sprint basis
• Iterate and update as you learn more about a project, product, or customer needs
• Sync in real-time so that everyone is on the same page
• Create multiple roadmap versions to account for different scenarios
• Share your roadmaps with stakeholders

We designed the simplest roadmapping tool for Jira. Our Easy Agile Roadmaps For Jira help development teams create product roadmaps that are simple to use, flexible, and collaborative. It offers an intuitive one-click drag-and-drop functionality and a super-clean user experience. Watch a demo of our roadmaps in action to learn more.

Jira Software reporting

Image credit: Atlassian

No matter how you choose to use Jira, you’ll gain access to a range of critical insights. Clear metrics will help your team make data-driven decisions. Utilize agile reports and dashboards to better understand what you’re doing well and where you can improve your process.

Use Jira reporting to analyze sprint reports, burndown charts, release burndowns, velocity charts, cumulative flow diagrams, and more. Real-time data helps teams track progress in a meaningful way, including managing sprint progress and accounting for scope creep. Take clear data into your retrospectives and provide customizable dashboards to stakeholders and leadership.

With Jira reporting, you can:

• Make data-driven decisions
• Track your progress against both product and sprint goals
• Monitor progress so you can take action if work falls behind
• Use past data to create realistic estimates
• Spot overcommitment and excessive scope creep
• Catch bottlenecks
• Predict future performance
• Take clear metrics intro retrospectives
• Provide stakeholders with visual data using customizable dashboards

Jira Software integrations

Image credit: Atlassian

Jira offers integrations with the tools and apps your team is already using. You can seamlessly connect Jira Software to plugins like Bitbucket, Trello, Confluence, GitHub, Slack, and many more. There are thousands of integrations available.

You can also extend Jira Software with over 3000 apps available in the Atlassian Marketplace. The marketplace contains apps for dozens of categories, including code review, design tools, reports, time tracking, and workflows.

That’s where you’ll find the Easy Agile products we designed to offer teams a customer-centric approach to product development.

Easy Agile TeamRhythm is trusted by companies of all sizes, including Amazon, Twitter, Adobe, AT&T, Cisco, JP Morgan, and Rolex. Our team agility app helps you and your team deliver for your customers by prioritizing the work that will deliver the most value to your users. It helps you work better together with smooth sprint and version planning, simple story mapping, easy backlog refinement, and team retrospectives for continuous improvement.

Access a free trial for 30 days. If you have questions, contact our team to learn more about our suite of Jira products.

For more content written for Jira users just like you, follow the Easy Agile Blog and tune into the Easy Agile Podcast for an inside look at the most interesting and successful business, tech, and agile leaders.