Fake Agile Teams Waste Too Much Time on Project Management Tools like Jira

Using Jira does NOT mean doing Agile. In fact, fake agile teams waste too much time using project management tools.

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Substack version of this article.

When joining a new software project in the past 15 years, a newcomer would quickly notice that the entire development process revolves around a project management tool — typically Atlassian Jira. In a so-called ‘Agile’ team, the following activities are often carried out through Jira (or a similar tool):

• A Business Analyst creates a user story in Jira
• The Agile coach plans a sprint on Jira.
• The team estimates user story points on Jira.
  (Yes, estimating user story points is silly, but still, many teams are doing it)
• In daily stand-up meetings, team members often use Jira.
• Developers started coding on an assigned user story (reading it on Jira).
• Developer and Business Analyst comment on user stories to clarify requirements on Jira.
  (This is very ineffective and common. Also, nearly every story with long conversations leads to more misunderstandings and sometimes blame. Why are people doing that? Because the project needs…