In this video, we will discuss visualizing work using boards. We will start by discussing the principles of visualizing work. A to-do list is a classic example of a tool used to visualize your work, even though a to do list is very simple to use, it has some valuable characteristics. One is that it visually reminds you of the work that you need to do. We all have a tendency to forget things if we don't write them down, especially if there are a lot of items. A to do list focuses you because you can concentrate on doing only the things on the list. If you want, you can prioritize the work items on your to do list simply by changing their order. As you check off your work items, you are tracking your progress. This is usually quite rewarding. We will see that this simple example of a to do list contains a lot of the building blocks related to visualizing the work of Agile team. A principle of Agile projects is to visualize work. A board is an Agile tool used to help visualize and manage the work of the team. Depending on the circumstances a board may also be referred to as task board, project board, kanban board, or scrum board. A board can be a physical board like a whiteboard with sticky notes, or can be based in software. The board shown here is in JIRA. Depending on which template that you choose when creating the project, a board can automatically be created for you. In our example, we chose the kanban template when we created the project, so JIRA created a kanban board. We can view the board by clicking on the kanban board tab in the sidebar. You can see that the board contains columns. Each column can contain issues which are the work items for the project. This board contains three issues and they are all currently in the backlog column. As the team works on issues, they move the item to the next column until the item is in the done column. You can see that a board is like a two-dimensional to do list. The extra dimension is used to allow a work item to go through multiple steps before it is finished. Agile teams commonly break up the project into manageable issues and work on them in steps like this. Why is visualizing work and important principle of agile? Like a to-do list. Visualizing work with tools such as a board makes things easier, better and more rewarding. Visualizing work allows everyone to see the current state of the work of the project. With the board, you can easily see which items are done, which items are in progress, and which items have not been started. Boards are very transparent in that they show the true state of the project, not only to the project team, but to any stakeholders who have access to the board. Visualizing work also organizes and focuses the team. The team should only be working on the issues on the board and the next issue to be worked on is very obvious. Visualizing work allows you to manage things. For example, the team can easily add items to the board, modify existing items, or change their priority. As the team works on a work item, the item can be updated to show the progress. Visualizing work can also improve the team's way of working. A key principle of agile projects is to continuously improve not only the product, but the way that the team works on the product. A board can help the team visually identify problems or bottlenecks with the process. This highlights areas for the team to focus on improving. Visualizing your work and managing a board like this also works well for your personal projects. It focuses you and helps you increase your productivity and effectiveness. Most of the concepts in this course can be applied to your personal life. Next, we will discuss workflows. To set of columns of a board represent a workflow for completing an issue. Workflows are used to model the processes involved in the project. Even though workflow technically can be considered a model of a process, you often will find the terms workflow, process, business process, and value stream used interchangeably. They all represent breaking down the work into a series of steps. Each column in a board usually represents a single step in the workflow. These steps may also be called: statuses, states, or stages. You can see that workflows and boards are closely related. The board visualizes the workflow. The board shown here has four statuses in the workflow. These statuses happened to have the same name as the columns in the board. The statuses are backlog, selected for development in progress and done. Let's take a simple process and model it as a workflow. We will model the process of ordering and delivering a customer's food at a restaurant. The first step of the workflow is for the wait staff to take the order from the customer. In the second step, the waitstaff adds the order to the cooks queue. It's placed in a queue because the cook only can start the order when they have bandwidth. In the third step, the cook takes the order from the incoming queue and begins to prepare it. In the fourth step, the cook has finished the preparation and adds the order to the delivery queue. It's placed in a cube because the cook usually doesn't directly deliver the order to the customer and the wait staff might not be immediately available. In the final step of the workflow, the wait staff delivers the order to the customer. Even though this is a simplified example of a workflow, the same basic idea of breaking down the work of the project into steps applies. One of the benefits of breaking down the work into steps is that the work of the steps can be done by different performers, allowing the process to scale to large teams. You can model any process that you want using this simple block diagram approach. All it takes is a pencil and paper. We can see that boards and workflows are closely related. A team works using a board. The board structure is defined by underlying workflow. This example shows the restaurant workflow that we just defined. Below that we have created a Jira project with columns of the boards matching the workflow. We will discuss configuring boards later. Next, we will further discuss Jira boards and workflows. Boards are automatically created when you create a project using Kanban or Scrum templates. In this example, we have created a Kanban project and you can view the board by navigating to your project and clicking on the Kanban board tab in the sidebar. You can create additional boards at anytime. A single project can have multiple boards, and a single board can contain the issues of multiple projects. To create another board, select the More option to the right of the board, then select Create Board. We will further discuss creating multiple boards later. In Jira, every project that is created automatically has an associated workflow. The status field for each issue must be set to one of the workflows statuses. In this example, this issue status is currently set to Backlog, and the dropdown box shows that there are three other statuses that we can set for this issue. We are now in a better position to understand boards. Boards are a view of issues arranged by status. When you move an issue to a different column in the board, you are changing the value of its status field. There are several ways to change an issue status. The first is that you can drag an issue from one column to another. A change in an issue status is called a transition. Another way to change an issue status is in the issue details. You can change the status using this status dropdown box. This will move the item to a new location on the board. To view the workflow or workflows related to the project, navigate to the project and click on the Project Settings tab in the sidebar. The scope of this Settings tab is this project only. Click on Workflows to see the project's workflows. Here we can see that there's a single workflow for this project. This workflow was created by Jira when you created the project. Click on the diagram link to view the workflow as a diagram. After clicking the diagram link, you are shown a diagram of the workflow for the project. This is the default workflow when you select Kanban as the project template when creating the project. The gray dot at the top of the workflow represents the creation of an issue. The gray arrow pointing from the dot to the Backlog is a transition and means that when you create an issue, its workflow status is automatically set to Backlog. The selected for development, in progress and done boxes represent the three other statuses in the workflow. Notice that all four statuses in the workflow haven't all box with an arrow pointing to its status. To gray arrows represent transitions from one status to another. The all boxes mean that the issues that are in any other status can be transitioned to this status, and the board this means that you can drag an issue from any column to any other column. For example, you can change the status of an item from Backlog directly to Done if you would like. In Jira you can customize workflows in many ways, including the enforcement of step-by-step movement of issues through the workflow. This can be used to ensure that every step of the workflow is completed. Next, we will discuss configuring board columns. Boards can be configured to match the workflow of your team. This is important because Agile teams are always improving the process, which means that the workflow may change over time. To configure a board, navigate to the board, select the More icon, then select Board settings. The Board Settings screen contains seven tabs. Each of these tabs allow you to configure the board in different ways. For now, we will just focus on the columns tab. From this screen, columns of the board can be added, removed, reordered, renamed, and modified. We have not discussed user permissions yet, but for now you should know that all users can't make changes to the board. For example, to add a new status to the workflow and column to the board, you must be a project administrator for the project. We will discuss permissions more later. You can see that this board currently has four columns. These are the default columns for Kanban boards. The column names are shown at the top and here you can click on the column name to change it on the board. The workflow status associated with each column is also shown. Every column must have at least one associated workflow status. In this case, and in most cases, the column name matches the status name. As an example of configuring the board, we will add a review column after the in-progress column. This will add a status to the workflow so that issues are reviewed before they are done. To add a column, you click the Add Column button. In the Add Column dialogue, we enter review as the name of our new column. When you do this, Jira will also create a status and add it to the associated workflow assuming that the review status is not already there. When you add a column, you need to assign it to a category. A category is like a meta status, and can contain only one of three values. To do means that the issue hasn't been started. In progress, means that the issue is being worked, on and done means that the issue is finished. The category identifies where the issue is in its life cycle. It's important to assign the correct category to the column because this affects Jira's behavior. After naming and assigning a category to the new column, click the Add button. We can see that our new review column has been added to our board. To review column contains a blue bar, which means that the status category is in progress.The gray bar represents a status with a category of to-do, and the green bar represents a status with a category of done. You can drag and drop the columns to rearrange them. Notice that adding a review column automatically added a review status to the workflow. This is because by default, compound Projects use what is called a simplified workflow. You can see that this is a simplified workflow by the message here. A simplified workflow is a Jira managed workflow. This is very handy, but if you need more powerful or customize workflows, you also have the option of managing the workflow yourself. When you are configuring the columns under board settings, there is a set resolution checkbox for each status. If set resolution is checked, Jira considers the issue resolved or closed when the issue is in the associated status. This sets a value for the field named resolution to done. We don't want to check the box for the review column because the issue is still open while we are reviewing it. When an issue is moved to a status that sets the resolution field, Jira changes the resolution from unresolved to some other value. In the usual case, the resolution is set to done as we see here. Jira will also update the result field with a date and time that the resolution field was set. These values are used for reporting. We will see more on the resolution and resolved fields later in this course. When we view our board, we can see the new review column. Issues can now be moved to this column exactly like moving them to the other columns. If we view an issues details, we can select the status drop down and see that our review status is now a selectable option. Next, we will discuss Configuring Board Cards. A board contains cards which contain a small number of the field values for an issue. Here's a typical card. The icon in the left is the issue's type, which in this case is a story. The arrow represents the issues priority. The dots represent the relative number of days that the issue has been in this column. In the lower right is the issue key and the icon for the assignee, or person who is responsible for completing the issues work in that column. In addition to these fields, you may see other fields on the card, such as epic labels, which we'll discuss later. Under boards settings, you can select the card layout tab to show up to three extra fields. In this example, we have selected the created field name, from the fields drop-down and click the Add button. We have also decided to turn off the days in column indicator that we saw on the cards. When we view the board, we see that the card now contains the date that the issue was created and that the days in column dots are no longer shown. You can use the card colors tab under boards settings to configure the color of the cards. You can select from a number of methods in which to display colors. We will select to display colors by assignee. When we view the board, we will see a vertical colored line representing the assignee. We have chosen a purple line for this user. Here's a review of what we've discussed in this video. A board is an agile tool used to visualize and manage work. The columns of a board are related to the steps of a workflow. Changing and issue's column on a board in Jira changes the value of the issue's status field. Jira board columns can be configured to match your team's workflow. Jira board cards can be configured to add up to three fields. Now it's time for you to work on some of the things that we have discussed in this video. Separate hands-on instructions are provided for you.
