JIRA Agile brings the power of agile to a web-based system where progress and reports can be accessed and shared with everyone, even if they aren't physically co-located together. However, sometimes it is still useful to have a physical board and cards so meetings such as daily stand-ups can feel more interactive and refreshing, rather than having everyone stare at a computer monitor all the time.
This can be done with a third-party add-on called Agile Cards for JIRA. You can search and install it from the UPM, in the same way you install JIRA Agile as explained in Chapter 1, JIRA Agile Basics, or download it from the following link, and upload it to JIRA:
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.spartez.scrumprint.scrumplugin
Once you have installed the Agile Cards add-on, you will see a new print icon added to your boards. The following screenshot shows the new icon in the Backlog view of a Scrum board. The icon is also available in the Active sprints mode and on Kanban board:
When you click on the print icon, a new tab will be opened, and each issue will be turned into a card, as shown in the following screenshot:
After you have printed your Agile Cards, you can cut them up and pin them onto your physical board, and use them in your team meetings.
After all, printing out your tasks and pinning them on a board is only half the story; you would need to import all these changes back into JIRA Agile at then end of your meetings. The Agile Cards add-on does just that, by letting you take a photo of your board, and then import that back into JIRA Agile.
Now, the first thing you need to do is make a change to your print layout to include column information for your cards. To do this, perform the following steps:
- Browse to the JIRA administration console and select the Add-ons tab.
- Select the Settings option from the left-hand side navigation, under the AGILE CARDS heading.
- Click on the Edit link for the default template (unless you have created custom templates, in which case you should edit your own template).
- Click on the Simple Layout tab.
- Select the KR code – for Board Scanner option from the Upper-left image field.
- Click on the Save button to update your settings.
With this change, when you print your Agile Cards, you will see a different code marking on the left-hand side of your cards, as shown in the screenshot that follows. This is very important as these markings contain each card's current column information:
Now that you have added column information to your card printouts, the next thing you need to do is print out a few more items to help Agile Cards better process your photo. Perform the following steps:
- Browse to the Scrum or Kanban board where you have printed your Agile Cards.
- Expand the Add-ons section and select the Agile Cards: Define Task Board Layout option, as shown in the following screenshot:
- Set up the board layout to mimic your physical board—which should have the same set up as your JIRA Agile board—by clicking on the Add region link. You should have one region per board column.
- Click on the Print splitters button. This will open up a new tab, with a new image called splitters for you to print. A splitter is a piece of paper you need to place between each column you have, so if you have three columns, two splitters will be generated.
- Pin the splitter images onto your physical board, as shown in the following image. This will help Agile Cards to determine which column each card belongs to:
- Take a photo off your board, and send it to your computer.
- Select the Agile Cards: Upload Task Board Photo option.
- Click on the Upload Photo button, and select the photo from step 7. If the photo is processed successfully, you will get a summary of all the changes, as shown in the following screenshot.
- Review the result and click on the automatically change status link to update all issues, or the bulk edit links for each column and process them individually:
Agile Cards has several other customization options, such as letting you customize the layout of your card so you can decide what fields will be included in the printout. You can find out more at https://confluence.spartez.com/x/GwAt.