Visualizing JIRA Agile projects in Structure

Development teams may be fine with their Agile perspective, but a 'bird's eye view' of a project can often be much more digestible for other stakeholders.

Whether you need to show an overview of a single JIRA Agile project, a big picture across multiple projects, or just a detailed view of one epic with its stories and subtasks laid out in a meaningful hierarchical fashion, Structure has the solution.

Visualizing a large Agile project is considerably more intuitive when epics, stories and subtasks are grouped and laid out in a hierarchical list. This can be achieved using Structure simply by adding the project's issues to a structure and arranging them into a hierarchy.

Hierarchical overview of a JIRA Agile project

In case the idea of manually creating a hierarchy by dragging and dropping hundreds of Agile issues doesn't appeal, Structure can automate both the import of JIRA Agile projects and the creation of corresponding hierarchies using a special process called a synchronizer.

That same synchronizer can then maintain two-way synchronization between your structure and your Agile boards, meaning that changes made in JIRA Agile can be reflected in Structure and vice versa. We'll cover synchronizers in more detail in part three of this series, which will be about managing JIRA Agile projects with the help of Structure.

With our JIRA Agile project in structure, we can clearly see at a glance the hierarchical relationships between epics, stories and tasks, all within the context of the project as a whole. No matter how our backlog is ordered in JIRA Agile, structure will continue to display an impeccably organized hierarchical view with tasks nested under stories under epics.

Impeccable organization in closeup

This is a great way to create an easily comprehensible overview of a single JIRA Agile project that can be shared with and enjoyed by project teams and enterprise management alike, but what if you want to get an overview of multiple projects, or view them in a way that doesn't quite fit the epic-story-task model?

Breaking the Agile mold

In real life projects, the way that work needs to be carried out might not always match the Agile flavors that project management tools are built to represent, especially in large enterprise. Agile purists - you might want to skip the last few paragraphs.

Stuff happens. A task in one team's project might be blocked by an entire project being carried out in another team. Being able to visualize such relationships is pretty vital to proper planning and prioritization. Structure to the rescue.

Structure is utterly relaxed about the logic of its issue hierarchies. It doesn't really give a hoot if you put an epic from one project underneath a bug from another, a story under a task or a theme under a story. Given this flexibility, you can create practically any view of any number or projects you wish.

Pictured: Anarchy

In the unthinkable event that an entire project is blocking a task in another project, we could actually place the whole offending project right under the task it blocks. Extreme, maybe, but a pretty neat visualization and quite easily achieved with Structure.

Bear in mind that none of this in any way detracts from our day-to-day Agile practices. Nothing that we do in Structure will stop our JIRA Agile projects from being Agile. All we are doing is creating alternative views of relationships between issues.

Stay tuned for the next installment of the series, where I'll be looking at how we can use these alternate views for progress tracking in JIRA Agile projects.