Jira Scrum Board

Jira Scrum Board is a tool used to unite the teams to achieve a single goal and incremental-iterative delivery.

Functions of Scrum Board

• Increase communication and transparency
  Jira Scrum board is the single source through which all the work of a team can be accessed by a team member at any time. This increases communication among the team members and transparency.
• Promote sprint planning and iterative development
  The heart of the Scrum framework is a sprint, which is a fixed amount of time for teams to build a releasable product increment. Jira scrum board is mainly designed so that the teams can organize their work within the sprint timeframe.
• Improve team focus and organization
  Sometimes teams forget the project deadlines, and they are over-committed on their workload. Jira Scrum Boards provide transparency to the team's work by dividing the work into multiple stages and providing the burndown and velocity reports.

Following are the important terms related to a Scrum Board:

• Sprint
  A sprint is a time-boxed iteration of time which is mainly of 2 weeks. When the sprint is completed, then it produces the most valuable, useable, and releasable product in the market.
• Backlog
  The Backlog is owned by the Product owner. Product Backlog is a list of features, defects, enhancements, experiments that are to be considered in the product.
• User story
  • A user story is the smallest unit of work in an agile framework. A User story is a goal, not a feature which is expressed in terms of the user's perspective.
  • The purpose of a user story is to show how a piece of work will deliver a particular value back to the customer.
  • User stories are the sentences written in simple language to provide the desired outcome.
  • It should be in a granular format so that it can be delivered within a sprint. Sprint is nothing but a time-bound iteration to deliver the working software.
  • User story comes under the epic, and epic is a large chunk of work, user stories come under the epic. Some user stories are taken from the epic and placed in a particular sprint. This cycle goes on until and unless all the user stories within a sprint are completed.
• Issue
  An issue is also known as user story. In scrum board, an issue contains all the tasks, dependencies, and other relevant information required to perform a single piece of work.
• Epic
  Epic is a large chunk of work. It is basically a large user story which can be broken into a number of smaller stories. All the user stories in the epic might take several sprints to complete.
• Swimlane
  Swimlane is a means of categorizing of issues in an active sprint of a scrum board or a kanban board. It helps you to distinguish the tasks of different categories, such as users, workstreams, etc.

Layout of the Scrum Board

The Scrum Board is a physical board on which the user stories present in the current sprint backlog are displayed.

Scrum board is divided into columns such as:

• Stories: This column contains all the user stories available in the current sprint backlog.
• TODO: This state contains the subtasks of the stories on which the work has not started on.
• In Progress: This state contains all the tasks on which the work has started.
• Done: This state contains all the tasks on which the work have been completed.

Steps to create a Scrum project

• Click on the projects appearing on the left side of the page.

• Click on the Create Project button to create a new project appearing at the top right corner of the page.
• Click on the template link.

• Select the scrum project from the template.

• Enter the project name.

• In the below image, TP Board is created, which is the short name for the project named as "Test project".

The whiteboard shown in the above image is the Jira board, which consists of issues related to a particular project.

Displaying the issues on a scrum board provides the flexibility for viewing, managing, and tracking the progress of an issue.

The backlog is empty for the newly created project. It is filled only when you add the tasks or an issue in the Backlog.