Are JIRA and Agile the same thing?

JIRA is an issue tracking system. It started as software for help desk and IT requests. Some of us who have been in the game since a long time remember Greenhopper – a third party plugin for JIRA that allowed backlogs and Scrum boards. Eventually this was rolled into the main product when Atlassian realised they wanted to get on board on the Agile train. This is an Agile product strategy in itself – they saw that people needed agile tracking, so they pivoted their product that way. Good for them.

No software system is essential for successful Agile – and I’ve seen many teams and companies claim to be Agile because they use JIRA. Wrong.

If you must use a digital tracking system over physical boards – perhaps because you have distributed teams – then JIRA is not the worst tool. It’s generally there because managers want reports and the status, and because there is work to be distributed and handed off between multiple teams. But using it in this way tends to also mask the key problems and agile practices – where there are dependencies between teams, try to eliminate the dependencies. And face to face communication and collaboration always beats bits and bytes.

Some other advantages – gives you record of work done (or not done for that matter). Allows recording and communication of acceptance criteria, UI and other materials useful for developers and testers.

But JIRA does not equal Agile.