Agile software developmentTools to fit your process

Planning with virtual index cards

As development teams grow and become distributed, agile planning practices with index cards and whiteboards are increasingly difficult to coordinate. Use JIRA with GreenHopper to conduct your planning sessions online.

All development tasks — bugs, features, requirements, user stories or whatever you call them — are represented as colour-coded virtual index cards with a description and an estimation of effort required to complete the task.

The Planning Board shows the current backlog of tasks for you to prioritise into your next iteration or sprint. Progress is tracked at any point using the burndown chart on the Chart Board or with charting and reporting gadgets on your JIRA dashboard.

We've been using Jira for two months now and it has become a "must have" for our development department. — Cody Burleson of Burleson Technology Group

Agile for developers

GreenHopper is not just for planning. Developers claim cards off of the Task Board and indicate the status of what they are working on by simply dragging virtual index card across the swim lanes.

As cards transition to completion, the actual effort and resolution information is recorded to track progress and to help with future estimation and planning sessions.

Practising Kanban? Set the swim lanes to turn red if you exceed your defined limits for each step in your process.

GreenHopper is easy to get up and running and easy to get results from fast. — Cody Burleson of Burleson Technology Group

Integrate with the tools you use

JIRA works closely with other Atlassian development tools to provide context and visibility to what the entire team is working on.

Practising collective code ownership? FishEye for JIRA reveals the true progress of your stories by showing all related commits as well as code-level statistics for each iteration.

Practising continuous integration? JIRA's Bamboo integration shows which builds are related to which stories, allowing you to see exactly which successful build includes the result of a given story or iteration.

Practising code review or pair programming? Integrated Crucible code reviews allow you to ensure four eyes have seen every piece of code written and search for issues which are yet to be peer reviewed.

Developers rarely have to leave their development workbench to access any of these tools when using the Atlassian IDE Connectors for either Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA.