Agile or no Agile, GreenHopper's good for JIRA

GreenHopper is a plugin for Atlassian JIRA that has been recognized for its support of Agile Software Development. Its user interface represents JIRA issues as index cards that can be easily arranged on a planning board by simply dragging and dropping the cards.

Agile methods often promote the fluid movement of index cards on a planning board to guide software development teams. Requirements are collected in a backlog and pulled from the backlog to the planning board in order to define what is known as a 'sprint' (a typically two to four week period in which the team creates a potentially shippable product increment). Lately, I've been trying to improve my Agile knowledge and skills, so I installed a trial of the plugin to see how it might help. The biggest surprise for me was how useful GreenHopper can be whether your team is practicing an Agile approach or not. Had I not been studying Scrum, for example, I might not have ever tried the plugin and that's a shame because it puts a polish on JIRA that any user can appreciate.

In my opinion, the number one problem GreenHopper solves is that it vastly improves the ability to prioritize and visualize priorities in JIRA and this is something every JIRA user can appreciate regardless of any particular purpose of use - whether that is bug tracking, trouble ticketing, project management, Agile development, or anything else.

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Let me give you an example of a real problem GreenHopper solves for me. I often use JIRA to aid in project management with distributed teams. JIRA allows me to assign issues to team members (tasks, feature requests, defects, questions). Team members can comment on issues which allows us to keep a 'paper trail' of the relevant discussions and decisions that have been made around a given subject. When team members start progress on an issue, I can easily see what everyone is working on at any given time. We can pass issues around by reassigning them to one another and we can prioritize issues as blocker, critical, major, minor, or trivial. These features alone make JIRA great for collaborative project management, but what JIRA lacks out-of-the-box is an easy way to order issues in a sequence (i.e. this task should be done before this one, then this task next, and so on).

Neither JIRA or GreenHopper provide an ability to define dependencies between tasks (that I am aware of), but I have often used sub-tasks to accomplish the same goal. In JIRA, sub-tasks can at least be arranged in an order of steps under a parent task which can provide a generalization of the order in which things should be done. Still, however, ordering sub-tasks is cumbersome. To move a sub-task up in a list, you have to click on an arrow and await the completion of a screen refresh for each move. Moving one sub-task to the top of a long list in this manner is excruciating and GreenHopper fills the gap.

With GreenHopper, there is no longer a need to rely on parent tasks and sub-tasks to sequence issues. It just becomes a simple matter of drag-n-drop. This is made possible by a new field type called a GreenHopper Ranking field. Once associated to a screen in a project, issues are automatically ranked against this field when issue cards are rearranged. Of course, I've only been evaluating the plugin for a day and have barely scratched the surface, but as much as we use JIRA, this benefit alone is huge.

If you are like me and have always thought of GreenHopper as just a tool for Agile Software Development, I urge you to take a closer look. It may be especially great for Agile teams, but it's also great for any JIRA user in general.