Jira Software Cloud: Scaling from discovery to delivery

First, a reminder, what is Jira Software?

A tool to help your teams visualize and handle their issues using a Kanban or Scrum board.

Jira Software tips for success

How to keep your Jira instance clean so users get the most value:

• Keep it simple
• Reuse often
• Use naming conventions
• Test new configurations and apps in a test environment/sandbox

Now, let’s explore how you can scale your Jira Software product.

How to scale Jira—think holistically

You have worked with Jira Software Server for a while now and have recently migrated to Atlassian Cloud.

Jira Software, together with other Atlassian tools and frameworks like ITIL and Agile, will support you in delivering value to customers by:

• Making you work in small batches
• Visualizing your work on different levels in the organization
• Seeing the bigger picture to help you make decisions

Keep reading to learn how your Atlassian products can help you achieve this. First, I will mention that there are four subscription plans available in Cloud.

Subscriptions plans

• Free
• Standard
• Premium
• Enterprise

Let’s consider the Premium subscription plan.

Atlassian tools in Cloud: How and when to use them

We will now explore the different Atlassian products to be used during your DevOps lifecycle.

Now, you don’t need to do the Jira upgrades yourself; you can focus on teamwork, ways of working and creating value for the company.

Product release management

You can configure your product release tracks in your Cloud instance according to the following:

• Continuous track, which is when changes are added as soon as they are available.
• Bundled track, which is the changes rolled out as a group once a month.
• Preview track, where you can view changes early in sandboxes.

Jira Software

You have and are still using your Jira Software products and visualizing your issues via a Kanban or Scrum board; now you want to learn more about what’s new in Cloud.

What's new and different in Atlassian Cloud?

• The graphical user interface looks a bit different.
• There’s now a timeline view in Jira Software projects to show a single project's roadmap.
• Team-managed projects allow flexibility by letting different teams handle their own project configuration instead of having a system administrator set up and manage it for them. Or, if you want more control and a structured way of working in your project configuration, you can use company-managed projects.
• Automation is included and is no longer an app.

Advanced Roadmaps

Maybe you want to visualize the product roadmap and need to have a higher level in the Jira hierarchy:

• Plan and visualize the product roadmap timeline.
• Coordinate and follow up with Scrum teams.

Jira Work Management

Nice views for your business and non-tech teams with a timeline, calendar view, and an interactive list view where users can update field values directly.

Separate products - further billing

Jira Product Discovery

Let the product owners have their own area separate from the product backlog to gather and prioritize new ideas. Then, when the ideas are mature and concrete, import them into Jira Software and your backlog.

Jira Service Management

Keep track of your ITSM issues, i.e., incidents, problems, and change management, and let your users create their service requests via a customer portal.

Other features/products to combine with Jira Service Management are:

• Asset, which will be your CMDB.
• Opsgenie, to notify your operations team about alerts and warnings.
• Confluence/project pages to guide your users on how to troubleshoot and sharpen knowledge within the company.

Confluence

Confluence is also integrated into JSM in the way of its information knowledge base.

When using the Premium subscription plan for Confluence, you can use two new tools in Confluence, whiteboards and team calendars.

Atlas

Collect links and messages and gather information and useful links within the team area.

Compass

Compass is a development experience platform used by teams to track the activity, dependencies, code, configuration, and connected Jira issues, i.e., development product health.

Statuspage

Monitoring and communicating incidents and scheduled maintenance to end users.

Opsgenie

Give your operations team notifications about alerts, warnings, and managed on-call schemes.

Jira Align

Make decisions on a program or management level above the teams and development.

Atlassian Analytics

Some reports are available from Jira Software, but with Atlassian Analytics, your organization can get more data about Jira usage.

Atlassian Intelligence

Summarize and find important information in your comment history to remove manual work.

Still on a self-hosted Server instance using Atlassian Data Center?

You can use some of the features mentioned in this blog post for Data Center instances.

Features built into Jira Software Data Center:

• Advanced Roadmaps/Plans (formerly Portfolio)
• Automation

Features built into Jira Service Management Data Center:

• Asset (formerly Insight) (JSM)
• Automation

Features built into Confluence Data Center:

• Confluence: Team calendars

Get the most from your Atlassian apps

By choosing the right products during your DevOps lifecycle, you can get the most from your investment.

Together with apps from the Atlassian Marketplace, your Jira Software product and Atlassian suite will extend and support your teams in their work, which will bring value to the business as a whole.