Hello, and welcome to the bottom map skills podcast on my passings CEO of and
we are getting into the tools of agile software development. Now, quick note here. Not getting
into the actual coding tools, but we're actually getting into the tools by which we can manage
projects in an agile way. And I'm very excited to introduce two tools to you today.
They're called JIRA. And confluence, and I'm particularly excited about sharing those because
they are made by my compatriot Australian friends. So what fantastic software it is, and I'll do
my good, proud Australian. Um, Tip of the hat to the team at Atlassian, you make JIRA and
[00:01:00] confluence. So, um, why, why is JIRA and confluence so important?

And why have I selected it as the key in terms of tools to managing agile software development
projects? Well, I have to say that when you are doing an agile project, I think the most important
thing to realize is intense. It's fast. Um, you've got a clear direction that you have to go. You
have to move fast.
It's a small team and there's this high degree of ownership that's required. And I think also what
you have to realize is that agile is a. Is an idea. And particularly if you're using scrum as your
method to do agile, where you have to trust in the process, and you've got to trust in the process
because unlike waterfall agile says, Hey, look at the [00:02:00] start of the project.
We don't know everything. So if we have a good process, we know in the end, we'll answer all
the questions that we're going to have. And so at the heart of that, there are kind of two big jobs
to be done by the individuals in an agile team. One, they have to collaborate, they have to work
on stuff together.

And two, it's all about managing your tasks, your contributions in your role. And later on in this
webcast, um, in this podcast series, we're going to talk about all the different roles, but there's
these two jobs, collaboration and tasks and tasks obviously kind of live in a greater workflow.
Now, if you're going to trust in the process of agile and scrum and you want to collaborate and
you want to get your tasks done, then confluence and JIRA.
Uh, the essential tools. Now, if you're a little bit more advanced, [00:03:00] you could be
adopting some additional, uh, tools you could be, um, uh, pulling together some, some ad-ons,
uh, here, but for the vast majority of people, you will find that confluence is graded, helping you
collaborate on your thinking in your ideas.
And JIRA is just great at prioritizing tasks and the work to be done. Now, the great beauty is
they work Batman and Robin because they're made by the same company. So if you want to
work in an agile way, if you want to deploy scrum, you go to kick open an instance of confluence
in JIRA. And what I want to do now is take you on a quick tour through the roles that they play
and why, why they're important.

So let's start with confluence. Um, the best way to think about confluence is it's almost like
Google docs meets a Wiki and it's specific [00:04:00] obviously for your project. And I like
confluence because it's a great way to edit your work, um, and to capture your thinking. And I
think it's really essential that uses.
Uh, that collaborate is in a project can work no matter where they are, they can accomplish
more together by, um, bringing the thinking together. A great example of this is, um, let's say
that we've got an idea for a certain feature. That idea has to be documented. It has to be tested
and validated and brought to life.

And you know, the thing is that, um, You will be amazed at how important it is to be able to look
back somewhere and find out why are we building this feature? How do we get to it? And what's
all the related information to it. It sounds a bit abstract [00:05:00] now, but when you're in a
process object, if you have this in a centralized place where everybody can understand.
What we've decided to do and why you can get on with more of the design and the
developments. You can see people's comments. Um, you can see the kind of story behind what
you're doing, and this alignment means that you can then focus more on doing great design,
great code and bringing things together. If you don't have this.

In a central place. What happens is you end up finding yourself, having all these calls and
meetings because people are, we're really on the same page and that's what conflict, souls.
And what's so fun is that putting the thinking behind a user story feature and Epic, a theme,
right? All that a backstory can then elegantly fit into this other tool.
[00:06:00] JIRA. And what JIRA does for you is at its heart. It is all about getting work, done the

task itself. And you know, the thing is we can have great task management for ourselves, but
here's the thing. How do others know what you're working on? And if they don't know what
you're working on, What has to happen is everybody has to have more calls and more
meetings.
Are you working on that? What, what are you working on right now? What's up for review.
What's complete. What's in your next to do list. If you don't have your, uh, tasks and workflow
centralized, then you end up spending all this time, just updating and synchronizing between
team members. And so what JIRA does a great job of doing is getting every member of the
team on the same [00:07:00] page as to what we're doing now.

What's next, what stuff is finished and ready for review and what stuff has been reviewed,
tested, validated, and can be marked as complete. So this planning and tracking of our workflow
is an essential part of an agile team because they move so fast. Particularly now most teams
are virtual and remote.
It's essential because if it wasn't there, you'd be wasting all that time. Like I talked about. So
these are two tools that are absolutely essential. So you have the backstory in confluence, you
have the dues, you have the activities, the tasks, um, stacked up in JIRA. Now in JIRA. What
we generally do is organize this as a backlog.
And we put this backlog of activities into a sprint, and this helps us track what we're doing. It
sees the general productivity of the team, and it brings all of the, [00:08:00] where the hell are
we into one single place. Now I just want to spend a quick moment to outline the key things. But
if you're working in this agile scrum way, particularly when you're organizing things in JIRA,
you're going to talk about four concepts around the work.
The smallest, most practical thing is a user story. And that's a requirement down to the pixel
down to the click of what's going to happen. In a screen in a moment of interaction for the user
that then gets bundled up into epics, which tend to be a little bit more, um, uh, common, bigger
feature sets rather than specific little interactions.

You then have an initiatives, um, bucket. I don't use those a lot, but the big one, uh, that I
certainly use is themes. These are, if you've got a product, um, a product might be built of, uh,
five, six themes. 2030 epics and [00:09:00] hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of users. This
architecture theme initiative, Epic story.
Is absolutely the currency, the vocabulary, the language of scrum and agile when you're using
these tools. And you really gotta spend some time getting into, into that. You can, um, obviously
if you are really interested in that kind of thing, jump over to bottom up.io, because we do a big
breakdown in our agile masterclass.

And you can learn a lot more about it, but this really is the key thing. And if there was one last
thought to leave you with the absolute conversation every day, every hour is where are we with
th...