Having spent 10+ years in consultancy business leading Agile / Lean / Digital Transformation for the companies we became proficient in a decent number of practices & techniques. Here good tooling is an awesome help. Especially important in the age of remote / geo-distributed teams. Atlassian Jira being de-facto a standard for Engineering Teams all over the world has a good basic tooling. When it comes to something unique or specific like Story Mapping or PI Planning in SAFe off-the-shelf solution is not enough. Atlassian Marketplace with all sorts of Apps is a solution to the problem. The downside of it is usually the following:
multiple Apps are not always aligned in a ways we want to use it
sharing data between the apps is problematic
you always find yourself in situation when you use 20% from one App and 30% from another paying 200% for both
This is how we came up with an idea
of a single tool
simple enough to apply to multiple use cases
customizable enough so when applied to specific use case could serve the wide range of purposes
Analyzing the mechanics of different practices and techniques we released it's all about two-dimensional table and mapping Jira issues on the cross roads.
Thus, we introduced a notion of Universal Board when user can select
one dimension and shortlist of values as columns
and another dimension and shortlist values as swimlanes
Selecting Jira issues from single or multiple projects and applying a custom JQL filter on top serves as data foundation for such Universal board.
So, now using drag and drop you can change appropriate values / props in Jira issues putting them into appropriate column / swimlane.
Taking in account a vast foundation of standard properties and the way they are used throughout the system. Plus Custom Fields including the fields created by 3rd Party Apps. Plus labels for additional taxonomy .. now, you can imagine an amount of use cases such Universal Board could bring.
This is how we gave birth to Advanced Kanban & Agile Boards.
From the description above you might think of multiple use cases already.
But we started with few we use ourselves a lot (aka eating our own dog food), namely
Please navigate to our Use Cases Center for more options as well as upcoming roadmap.
(1) Go to “My Boards“ section. If you do not have any active boards this going to be your default page.
Otherwise (if you already have one or few boards created) click on menu icon in top left corner to select “Manage Boards“
(2) Click on “Create board“ and pick the one from suggested templates that suits you best. Otherwise, choose “Custom Board“ and Next.
(3) You will receive an initial configuration screen. The following configuration items are the same for all the boards
Name of the board
Projects to pool Jira issues from
JQL to filter out the issues
The rest varies depend on the template. e.g. Custom Board has the following additional configurations
Column field to map to columns on the board
Swimlane field (optional) to map to swimlanes on the board
(4) Click “Create“
p.s. Have fun! We hope you enjoy our App. If you do we appreciate your review at Atlassian Marketplace. If you see areas where we can improve please do not hesitate to drop us a line. Appreciate it.