Learn advanced scrum practices with Jira Software

In this tutorial, we'll give you step-by-step instructions on more advanced scrum practices such as using epics, customizing your workflow and using reports in Jira Software.

Your team may need to work on features that comprise of a larger body of work. When this happens, you should consider using epics when planning your work and grooming the backlog. Epics are essentially large user stories that you can break down into smaller user stories. What's more, epics can span more than one project. So, if your team is working on user stories that build up a larger user story, which in turn affects multiple projects, go ahead and use epics — they can make project tracking easier in this scenario.

To use epics, head to the Backlog of your board, and expand the Epics panel by clicking EPICS.

Check out Working with epics for more epic goodness.(wink)

In Jira Software's default workflow, your issues move through three statuses: To Do, In Progress, and Done. If this is too simple, you might consider creating your own workflow so that the statuses in Jira Software match your team's process. For example, if your team works in a software development project, you might want to add statuses, such as Code Review, Awaiting QA, or Ready to Merge. You can make Jira reflect how your team works as much or as little as you like.

For more information, check out Issue workflows

You can go one better than customizing your workflow and optimize through automation. See 100s of automation templates in the Jira Automation Template Library.

Go to library

Jira Software is all about helping you unleash the potential of your team. With the Velocity Chart, you can see a summary of the work that your team delivers in each and every sprint. You can use this information to predict the amount of work that your team can realistically complete in future sprints. During sprint planning meetings, for instance, your team can go through the visuals of what's happened in previous sprints — the team's commitment vs actual completion — and then come up with more realistic commitments.

Check out Velocity Chart for more details on how to use it.

With everything that's going on in your project, it's also worth considering using wallboards to get your team up to speed in a quick glance. Connect your computer to a TV monitor and voila! Your Jira Software dashboard is now a physical wallboard — with the power of Jira Software's agile gadgets showing your team's progress in real-time.