Preface

GreenHopper is an Agile Project Management tool built as add-on to Atlassian issue tracking system Jira. The rich interface of the tool allows you to focus on the work in hand and aims to achieve productivity.

It provides inbuilt support for Agile methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban. The inbuilt support for these processes makes the process adoption much easier. The flexible and customizable nature of Jira allows you to configure the tool to map to the hybrid Agile nature of the process, suiting your team requirements best.

It allows you to quickly and directly start with the backlog creation for your project. Suiting best to Scrum you can create Epic/Story/Technical task issues in a smooth and quicker way. You can prioritize your backlog items based on different business requirements. Managing prioritized backlog items and filtering capability allows you to work with both small and large backlogs.

It allows teams to estimate the backlog in an efficient and quick way. Teams can choose the estimate measurement criteria from various options. It allows planning the sprint and managing the sprint backlog efficiently. Daily sprint or Agile team tracking, transparency, and visibility have never been so easy as it is with the GreenHopper task boards. The rich interface of the task board makes it easy for team members to work on day-to-day technical tasks, prioritize items on task board well, update the task status, and so on.

The reporting functionality of GreenHopper gives enough information for any Agile project. The sprint Burndown charts, Epic reporting, and velocity charts allow you to track teams and backlogs over sprints. The control chart allows you to focus on improvements for your process. The cumulative flow diagram gives information related to how the whole backlog is moving ahead. The additional Jira reporting feature allows you to generate relevant reporting capability to your project.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with GreenHopper, introduces the basic Agile concepts, Scrum terminology, prerequisites, installing GreenHopper, common glossary, and rich interface features.

Chapter 2, Planning Your Sprints with GreenHopper, allows creating a Jira project, Agile board, backlog items such as Epic, Story, and technical tasks, ranking the backlog items, and creating a sprint.

Chapter 3, Estimating and Time Tracking, helps to understand estimating and time tracking, estimating using Story points, business value, ideal hours, and Tempo plugin for time tracking.

Chapter 4, Using the Work Board to Update Issues, covers working with task board, adding columns, viewing issue details, updating issue status, ranking on task board, and using keyboard shortcuts.

Chapter 5, Using Quick Filters and Highlighting Issues, explains Jira filters for board, Quick Filters, Swimlanes, and using card colors for highlighting issues.

Chapter 6, Understanding the Burndown Chart, helps you to understand Burndown chart basics, typical Burndown charts, measurements units, and scope management.

Chapter 7, Ending a Sprint, covers completing a sprint, handling unfinished sprint backlog, sprint reporting, and completing an Epic.

Chapter 8, Project Reporting Using Charts, covers Agile project reporting, velocity charts, Epic reports, Control charts, and cumulative flow diagrams.

Chapter 9, Managing Kanban Team with GreenHopper, covers the Kanban system, creating a Kanban board, configuring task board columns, limiting work in progress using column constraints, creating swimlanes, ranking issues, and reporting for the Kanban team.

Appendix, Continuous Improvement, helps with the process improvements and GreenHopper tool integration points to achieve the same.

Who this book is for

The book is about managing Agile projects using the tooling system GreenHopper. It gives the brief overview of Agile process specifically Scrum and will explain step-by-step how different roles in an Agile tool can use the book in an Agile project. Any team member, project manager, product owner, Scrum master, Scrum team member (developer, designer, tester, and so on), or even the administrator can start using the tools for the project.

As a product owner or manager you will be able to plan the project. You will be able to create your project backlog, groom it over a period of time, and plan sprints tracking your milestones in the project. Using the tooling, you will be able to coordinate different team backlogs and different projects in a much smoother way.

As a Scrum master, you will be able to track and monitor the team using the tool. You will be able to work with product owners to manage and groom the backlog better and at the same time track how the team is doing using task board. Based on your situation and the dynamics of the team, you should be able to visualize the impediments better and respond to the m faster.

As a team member, you will be able to track your day-to-day tasks, clarifications, impediments, dependencies, and use your work hours in a much better way. The rightly configured and adopted tooling system will minimize the effort and overheads of using it.

Using the book, readers will be able to kick start with GreenHopper in a quicker way and will be able to utilize the system fast. Within a few steps, you will be able to get started with an Agile project.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

New terms and important words are shown in bold.

Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: “Click on the Free Trial button to install the plugin".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

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