Agile Project Management with GreenHopper 6 Blueprints: Written by an Agile enthusiast, this comprehensive guide to GreenHopper will help you track and manage your projects in a way that achieves the best value for your team. Excellent reading for everybody from stakeholders to scrum masters.

GreenHopper is built on top of the Jira application. If you are already working with Jira and already have a project backlog in place, you can directly start creating a board for the existing projects, which we will be covering in the next section.

To get started with using GreenHopper, click on the Getting Started selection under the Agile tab in the top navigation of Jira.

As shown in the preceding screenshot, you have presets available to choose from, based on well-suited processes your team is currently working on, as follows:

A board in GreenHopper is a place to display issues from single or multiple projects. If you already have created a board in the last section, you may skip down to the next Plan mode section.

You can create a board by clicking on create a new Scrum board link as shown in the first screenshot on the Getting started page:

As shown in the preceding screenshot, enter the following values for new board:

A typical Scrum board, displayed in the preceding screenshot, is the representation of three main phases; which are Planning, Tracking, and...

An Epic is a large functionality of a product which needs to be delivered and which can further be divided into user stories. An Epic can span over multiple Sprints, until it is all finished.

As shown in the following screenshot, click on the + icon in the Epics panel to create an Epic:

Create an Epic using the Epic issue type and enter the relevant details for your Epic. In the Epics panel, the Epic name you entered while creating the Epic is displayed along with issue details representing the Epic.

The panel also displays total issues (Story, improvements, bugs, and so on) assigned to an Epic along with the total estimates (here, Story points in our case for the Epic). For Epics created with no Epic name or missing Epic name, unlabelled Epic text is displayed.

Use drag-and-drop functionality on the Epics panel to rank the Epic within your backlog. Keep the high-priority Epic, which you will be working on first, on top.

To edit an Epic name, click on Edit name, which allows...

A user Story in Scrum is a user/actor conversation/requirement or a small functionality which can easily be unit tested and delivered in a limited time of a single Sprint. The Story belongs to an Epic.

To create a Story for an Epic, click on the create issue in epic link on Epics panel.

As shown in the preceding screenshot, to create a Story, select the relevant issue type and enter Story details. The newly created Story will be listed under an Epic and will also be visible in the Plan mode. If you select an Epic in the Epics panel, all the issues related to that Epic will be displayed on backlog panel. If you select one of the newly created stories, the Story panel is displayed on the right-hand side.

As shown in the preceding screenshot, the issue details panel is opened. You can perform all the relevant operations available to the issue on the same panel. The tag panel on the left-hand side allows you to do corresponding operations on the selected Story.

The Story details...

The technical tasks are deliverable tasks performed by the developers to deliver a Story in a Sprint.

To add subtasks to a Story in the Plan mode, select a Story to add subtasks to, and the details panel of the Story will be visible.

As shown in the preceding screenshot, click on the Create Sub-Task button on the issue details panel to add a subtask to an issue. The same panel also displays the list of existing subtasks for an issue. Based on time tracking enabled for the Jira system, you will be able to add hour estimations for the technical tasks. If time tracking is enabled, the Story details panel also displays the total efforts required for all the subtasks, as shown at the bottom in the previous screenshot.

By now you have your backlog ready with most of the required Epics which are further divided into different user stories to be delivered.

One of the important tasks in managing and grooming backlog is the ranking or ordering of different backlog items. From a business value perspective, not all functionality is of the same business value. Some functionalities are must have and some are good to have, having less business value.

As stated in the earlier section, you can rank Epics by drag-and-drop in the Epics panel and Epics will be relatively ranked in the panel. You will be able to focus on the Epic in the backlog which you are currently working upon.

To rank Story and other issue types in the backlog list, drag-and-drop vertically in the list based on the priority.

As shown in the preceding screenshot, you should be able to drag-and-drop each issue to prioritize it relatively. You can select multiple items in the backlog list by using Ctrl + Click or Shift + Click to move...

A Sprint in Scrum is an iteration to deliver a committed set of functionality for a product in a time box of nearly a month or less.

We have our prioritized backlog ready with us in the proper prioritized order. The next step is to estimate and pick a set of backlog items from product backlog to deliver in a particular Sprint. We will be covering the Sprint estimation process and capacity management in detail in the next chapter.

To create a Sprint, click on the Create Sprint button in the Plan mode under Backlog panel, as shown in the following screenshot:

It will create a blank Sprint for you. Click on the Sprint name to edit it with inline editing as per your current Sprint number. To plan the Sprint, click on the date fields for inline editing to set start and end dates for a Sprint.

To add Story items to a Sprint, drag stories based on preset ranking order of Story and drop it in the Sprint panel, the Sprint you are currently planning.

You can also select multiple items...

In this chapter, we created the team Agile board to get it started with Scrum way of working. We started the Agile team with a new Jira project and also with the existing project.

The board displayed the backlog items which the team will be working on. The team created different types of backlog items on the Plan mode. We created Epic and Story issues as part of the product backlog. We also covered creation of technical task items as part of Sprint planning meeting.

We also moved the items in the Plan mode to rank the items based on business prioritization. We will be covering the backlog items estimations in detail in the next chapter, where the team will learn to assign complexity points to each backlog item as part of backlog grooming and estimating.

Using Plan mode, the team created Sprint and committed on backlog items to be completed in a Sprint. The team started a Sprint and set the Sprint timelines to continue the Sprint. In later chapters, we will cover how to track a Sprint...