JIRA: The Project Leader’s Best Friend
In a perfect world, every single task bequeathed upon the modern development team is completed fully, satisfactorily and appropriately, without any bugs, glitches, issues or whatever else one chooses to label these annoying mishaps.
Regrettably, we do not live in this tech utopia – albeit, far from it. In fact, it is fair to say that no tech team has ever successfully developed a reasonable application without facing few hurdles along the way. “What? John developed the very same routine as the one I spent the last two weeks of my life developing?”, “I believe that I have tested every possibly option, but one can never be completely sure that it’s all there.”, “But why didn’t you tell me you needed this functionality before? Now it’s rather too late!” These expressions are colloquial within tech teams.
Enter JIRA: one of every self-respecting tech team’s allies out there. This project management tool is pretty straightforward and exploits a form of digitalised and agile development framework (one known as ‘Scrum’). Some would say that JIRA is a developer’s dream come true – the end of days for the management issues that plague every tech project.
For example, suppose that you’ve been assigned the role of Project Lead across a two-month project to manage: development phases (or ‘sprints’) to plan and adhere to, estimates to calculate and keep track of, tasks to create, delegate, and/or complete, as well as developers to collaborate with. Sounds like a lot of work.
To start with, JIRA takes everything to the cloud. You can effortlessly
• record all the tasks required onto JIRA
• set an estimate for them (say, two hours to connect to some external data source and feed in data when required)
• group associated tasks into sprints and assign them to a team.
Naturally, JIRA supports a user-friendly user interface (UI) that changes according to your project role (hiding away any irrelevant information).
Personally speaking, JIRA has enabled our development team to focus more on core development rather than on other annoying (yet necessary) tasks. The team has gained from automated tracking of project estimates since upon completion of a task, we log the time spent and a description of what has been completed is maintained. This also reflects on the generated reports that display information on the current sprint, overall project progress and various other aspects useful for sprint analysis.
If you currently face project management issues, I highly recommend considering JIRA. Without it I know I’d feel the dread: three weeks in, we would be swirling in a cauldron of unfinished tasks from one sprint and a fresh batch of new tasks to be added to another. This won’t be the team’s fault for that matter. It is the very real and ruthless world of tech.