Agile Scrum Workflow automations with Jira and Slack

Scrum workflow explained

Scrum is a great way of doing things and a typical scrum heavily confides on a set of meetings, roles, and tools that work in collaboration to help teams plan, structure, manage and deliver their work.

Typical scrum workflow involves the following set of meetings

Backlog grooming
Sprint planning
Daily Standups
Sprint review
Retrospective

Backlog grooming - Refining and prioritizing user stories, reviewing time estimates, adding new development features, estimates and priorities.

Sprint planning (Planning Poker) - Plans of the tasks/features/issues from the backlog that are to be included in the current sprint and describing sprint goals.

Daily Scrum - Discussion on what the team is up to on the previous day, any blockers and plan for the current day to achieve sprint goals.

Sprint review - Features developed during that sprint are demoed and the stakeholders feedback are incorporated to the backlog (list of tasks/features to be executed).

Retrospective - Discussion on the challenges and struggles faced, what worked and what did not and what they wish to keep doing and what have to be changed and the recommendations for change going forward.

Furthermore, most of the agile teams heavily rely on any of the agile project management tools like Atlassian Jira, Microsoft TFS, monday.com, Nifty or others to manage, track and be the backbone of their workflow processes.

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Need for scrum workflow automation

Scrum is steadily feasible and involves constant interaction among developers, testers, project managers and stakeholders with the prime form of face-to-face communication.

When Scrum is introduced, the development teams tend to embrace it more energetically and zestfully. However after some days, despite the fact that Scrum enables them to deliver best value work to the customers, the team usually tends to feel that these processes demand more time and effort from everyone involved.

We have consolidated User opinions and voice of customers over the years to see what we can do to help the teams in a smart way. And most of them prefer getting these processes done in a quicker and time saving fashion.

We at Troopr, have built a comprehensive solution around it and use it ourselves in our team everyday and loving it. Troopr enables agile teams to smoothly move through the Scrum processes - planning, opening, tracking, and closing the sprint in a time-effective manner.

Some of the smartest agile teams around the world are already choosing Troopr’s Jira Slack integration bot and are super satisfied with the benefits that it brings into their teams.

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Thus the core purpose of Scrum workflow automation lies in the fact of making these processes time and resource efficient without compromising team collaboration and value of the work delivered.

Agile Scrum workflow automation with Jira and Slack

Now coming to the details of why Jira and Slack, and not any of the other SaaS tools. Ideally 78% of the project managers say they recommend using Jira for agile development. And thanks to great platforms like Slack, that is used by 600,000 organizations around the world and by far the most mature bot ecosystem for a business chat platform.

If you are one among the agile teams using Jira and Slack, let me give you a glimpse of how simple it is automating the agile scrum workflow in Slack.

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Automate daily Scrum meetings in Slack

Asynchronous standups in Slack for daily scrum
Enables issue references from Jira be linked and unfurled in the meeting channel
Compiled and aggregated meeting report delivered to product owner’s/project manager's slack channel or chat
Enables highly granular filtering in meeting reports to look for opportunities for improvements in team collaboration
Cross-team standups in shared slack channel involving members outside the team like contractors, partners and vendors to be a part of the meeting

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Automate most common Scrum ceremonies in Slack altogether

Troopr automates the most common Scrum ceremonies say, retrospectives, backlog grooming and planning poker in Slack (In beta)
Enables transparency in team meetings for remote (or remote friendly) team

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Automate Jira issue creation in Slack

Enables simpler and quicker way to create or convert any Slack messages or mentions into Jira issues
Jira issues creation is just a click away via “+issue” button and simple commands
Enables conversion of any slack messages or mentions or file attachments into a Jira issue

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Automate Jira actions in Slack

Enables taking actions on Jira issues from Slack, say answering/commenting on the issues, updating the issue fields (standard, custom) and as well updating the status of the issues.
Troopr’s Slack Jira bot automatically brings in the list of issues (assigned to you, or be a reporter, or any custom filters) and allows you to take actions directly from them. These also act as smart reminders on things that you may tend to miss on your schedule.
Troopr’s Jira Slack integration bot enables you to initiate discussions with team members by just mentioning the Jira key or associated keywords on the Slack chat or channel. These simple commands searches and unfurls the Jira issues and lets it open for team discussion, and associated team members to take actions on the issues directly from Slack
Enables automatic grouping and listing of the Jira issues based on actual or custom events
Automatic and smart delivery of scheduled, customized and actionable reminders on blockers, issues not updated in X days, overdue issues, missing issue fields, and actionable reminders on story points.
High level of configuration and flexibility allowing users to customize when and where to receive the notifications
Enables highly granular event filtering for better user and project experience

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Automate project updates in Slack

Enables project managers/product owners to promptly review and track progress of sprints at a glance, comprehensive weekly project status, different segmentation of tasks including team members contribution, tasks that are due and need to be done, active sprints, completed stories, changes in scope, and more.
Empowering team motivation via achievements and milestones on successful completion of story points and sprints.

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Automate project reports in Slack

Smart delivery of Jira reports on personalized daily briefing, recent progress issues, sprint status, burndown chart, velocity report, etc in Slack.
High level of configurability allowing users to personalize when and where to deliver the reports
Smart delivery of stakeholders report to their slack chat, even if they do not hold access to Jira, keeping everyone on the same page
Enables stakeholders to measure the success of the projects

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