Agile & Scrum Crash Course: Agile Project Management w/Jira

Explore the basics of Agile methodology, its origins, and core principles—flexibility, iterative progress, collaboration, and continuous improvement—and see how Agile contrasts with waterfall through a customer-focused MVP-driven example.

Explore how Agile accelerates value delivery in project management through iterative development and early MVP releases. Enhance flexibility, collaboration, continuous improvement, and a customer-centric approach to products.

Explore the Scrum framework, a lightweight, iterative agile approach with defined roles, ceremonies, and artifacts that enables collaborative, adaptable delivery of high-quality product through timebox iterations and continuous improvement.

Explore the difference between Agile and Scrum, where Agile is a flexible mindset and Scrum is a concrete framework with roles, ceremonies, and artifacts for iterative, collaborative project management.

Explore the benefits and challenges of agile project management with Jira, including faster time to market, flexibility, collaboration, and a customer centric approach, while addressing culture shifts and scaling.

Explains the four core values of the Agile manifesto, prioritizing individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change, and how they guide flexible, collaborative software projects.

Explore the 12 agile principles derived from the manifesto, guiding customer value, embracing change, frequent delivery, collaboration, motivated teams, face-to-face communication, working software, sustainable development, self-organizing teams, and continuous improvement.

Explore the product owner, scrum master, and development team roles, their responsibilities, and cross-functional collaboration to deliver high-quality, shippable increments from the product backlog each sprint.

Define and prioritize the product owner's vision to translate customer needs and market insights into a prioritized backlog, and collaborate with the Scrum team and stakeholders to maximize value.

The Scrum Master acts as a servant leader, coaching the team, facilitating events, removing obstacles, and shielding the team to enable agility, continuous improvement, and high-quality product delivery.

The development team delivers high-quality, releasable product increments through self-organizing, cross-functional collaboration to design, build, test, and refine with shared responsibility and continuous improvement.

Explore cross-functional teams within Scrum, where specialists collaborate to speed decisions, boost innovation, improve communication, and adapt quickly, guided by clear goals, open dialogue, trust, accountability, and regular scrum events.

Break down work into time-boxed sprints of 1–4 weeks to deliver a potentially shippable increment and adapt to change through sprint planning, daily scrums, reviews, and retrospectives.

Learn to plan sprints by selecting backlog items, defining a sprint goal, and building a sprint backlog with tasks and estimates through cross-functional collaboration.

Energize your team with a concise daily scrum that synchronizes tasks, surfaces obstacles, and strengthens collaboration, transparency, and accountability to drive the sprint goal.

Master the sprint review to win stakeholders by inspecting completed work and gathering actionable feedback. Adjust the product backlog to stay aligned with needs and priorities.

Inspect the past sprint, identify improvements, adapt plans for the next sprint, and foster continuous improvement within a safe environment to boost collaboration and efficiency.

Master the product backlog as a living, prioritized list guided by the product owner, featuring user stories, acceptance criteria, prioritization, and estimation.

Discover how the sprint backlog drives high-quality work by prioritizing user stories and tasks. Align with the sprint goal and use daily scrum updates and a scrum board for transparency.

Define and apply a clear definition of ready for backlog items to improve estimates, collaboration, and sprint readiness by detailing criteria like user stories, acceptance criteria, dependencies, sizing, and resources.

Define and implement a clear definition of done to ensure each backlog item is fully implemented, tested, documented, approved, and ready for deployment, delivering transparent, high-quality, shippable increments.

Learn to write user stories from the end user's perspective to capture requirements clearly, foster shared understanding, and prioritize value through collaboration and acceptance criteria.

Explore epics as storytelling for big picture thinking in agile projects, guiding roadmaps, prioritizing work, and breaking down into manageable user stories for multi-sprint delivery.

Master acceptance criteria as a clear, testable boundary for user stories in agile scrum, guiding development, estimation, collaboration, and testing to deliver aligned outcomes.

Explore story points as a relative unit of effort in scrum to estimate work, improve predictability, and prioritize items through collaboration and estimation techniques like planning poker and t-shirt sizing.

Craft clear sprint goals that guide agile teams and align work with project objectives. Apply smart criteria—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—to set focused sprint outcomes.

measure velocity to gauge sprint performance in story points, enabling data-driven decisions and better sprint planning. practice consistency, review velocity, and avoid cross-team comparisons to drive continuous improvement.

Visualize progress toward a goal by using burn up charts that compare work completed to scope and time, track velocity, adapt to scope changes, and improve predictability.

Visualize remaining work against time with a burn down chart to track sprint progress and bottlenecks; update daily and review during sprint reviews, considering external factors.

Learn planning poker, a consensus-based agile estimation technique that uses private card selections and open discussion to size stories in story points, improve accuracy, and boost collaboration.

Learn affinity estimating, a collaborative relative estimation technique that groups work items by size and complexity to quickly assign story points and improve planning and prioritization.

Explore t shirt sizing as a quick, intuitive agile estimation technique that assigns small, medium, large, or extra large to work items and converts them into story points for planning.

Explore Jira basics for agile project management, including customizable workflows, Scrum boards, backlog management, and reporting, to plan, track, and collaborate effectively across teams.

Learn to create a Jira project using the scrum template, choose team or company managed, name and key the project, and optionally sync with Slack or Teams.

Enable essential Jira features, organize your backlog, and start sprints to visualize progress on the board and track stories using reports like burndown and velocity.

Learn to create and groom Jira issues, define stories, estimate story points, set acceptance criteria, and manage dependencies in the backlog for sprint planning.