In the previous chapter, we looked at how to use JIRA Agile for the Scrum agile methodology. JIRA Agile comes with a set of tools to support Scrum, and sensible defaults to get you up and running quickly. However, you will often need to customize what comes out of the box by default, in order to better suit your needs. In this chapter, we will go over some of the most important options JIRA Agile provides, so it can better adapt to the way you need to run Scrum.
By the end of the chapter, you will have learned to:
- Manage your Scrum board's configuration
- Control what issues are to be included on your board
- Customize your Scrum board's column layouts
- Use swimlanes to group your issues
- Filter issues on your Scrum board with quick filters
When you first create a Scrum board using JIRA Agile's built-in templates, as outlined in Chapter 2, JIRA Agile for Scrum, the board is created with a set of default settings. Now, you as the board's administrator can go and customize these. To customize a board, perform the following steps:
- Go to the Scrum board you want to customize.
- Click on the Board drop-down menu and select the Configure option.
- Select General from the left navigation:
You can update the configuration options by first hovering over the field value, and then clicking on the edit (pencil) icon. The following table provides a summary of the configuration fields:
|
Field |
Description |
|---|---|
|
Board Name |
Name for the agile board. |
|
Administrators |
Users who can configure the agile board's settings. You can add more administrators by either selecting the users directly, or by selecting a group. |
|
Saved Filter |
This controls what issues will be included on the agile board. If you have created your board using the agile templates, then the filter here is automatically created for you to include all issues in the project. You can select a different filter to use, or click on the Edit Filter Query link to change the current filter. |
|
Shares |
This controls who will have access to the filter. In practice, the filter should be shared with the same users who have access to the board. |
|
Filter Query |
This shows you the actual filter query used by Saved Filter. |
|
Ranking |
This shows if ranking is currently enabled. You need to have ranking enabled to rank issues and create sprints. |
Ranking allows you to prioritize your issues by dragging and dropping them into your backlog and sprints. The higher an issue is, the more important it is. If ranking is disabled, you will get an error message similar to Ranking is disabled, as the Filter Query for this board is not ordered by Rank, when you try to drag your issues in the Plan mode.
If you have created your agile board by using the agile templates with either the new project or existing project option, then ranking will be enabled by default. However, if it is disabled for some reason, you can enable ranking by following the next few steps:
- Go to the Scrum board you want to customize.
- Click on the Board drop-down menu and select the Configure option.
- Select General from the left navigation.
- Click on the Add Rank button at the bottom to enable ranking:
After you have enabled ranking, you will notice that your Filter Query value is automatically updated. So in the preceding screenshot, the query project = "Sample Scrum Project" will be changed to project = "Sample Scrum Project" ORDER BY Rank ASC. Make sure you do not remove the ORDER BY Rank ASC part of the query, as that is the snippet that enables ranking for your query and board.