Scrum Standup in JIRA and Confluence

What? 

Scrum Standup plugins for JIRA and Confluence have been released.

They are available to download and try from https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/849934

Scrum Standup plugin for JIRA allows to quickly create a daily written standup report and link it with the issues you have worked on. It takes only a minute or two to prepare standup note. Just few clicks and few words - no worries about layout, edit conflicts, issue searching and linking hardness, no too large page kills your browser problem.
Scrum Standup plugin for JIRA contains dedicated view to display all daily standup notes for a project - great place for managers and absent folks.
Built in and configurable email notifications can keep you up to date with the ongoing team progress.

Take a look:

Scrum Standup plugin for Confluence allows to retrieve standup notes from JIRA and display them on the Confluence page. It gives you everything you need to familiarize yourself with the team progress on a single wiki page. Just open and read.

Screenshots:

Scrum Standup plugins for JIRA and Confluence are ready to download and try from https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/849934


Why?

There are two problems we want to solve with Scrum Standup plugins

Problem 1: Gather people together for a daily standup meeting.

Let's imagine following scenario.

You are a part of a team which uses JIRA for issue tracking. The team is small, agile and try to practice Scrum. You have a sprint planning meeting every two weeks when you prioritize backlog and estimate user stories, you try to meet every day on a short standup meeting so everyone in the team is up to date with others work, you perform a demo and sprint retrospective at the end of iteration. All of that helps your team to work smarter with no additional effort. Sweet... but what if:

• One or more of your team members work remotely and your team is dispersed. 
• Part of your team works in a different timezone and there are 9 hours of difference. 
• Some of the team members are 'burn the midnight oil' geeks and start work in the afternoon. 
• People get sick or their kids get sick and they work from home for a few days. 
• Someone started to build a house of dream and works in totally unpredictable manner. 
• There are other reasons which make it difficult to gather people together every day at specified time. 

In terms of sprint planning or retrospective meetings it is not a big problem. They happen once a week, biweekly or even more rarely so it is not very painful to gather people and perform video or Skype meeting. People tend to agree for an afternoon or very early morning meeting if it happens no more than once a week. They can get up early this day, take a baby sitter and deal with their private stuff another day. No big deal.

Scrum standup meeting is a different story. It happens daily so if you run into one of the listed above cases it may be impossible to gather the team together at the same time everyday.
There are many solutions:

• Reorganize your project and team so there are no remote folks.
• Run Scrum of Scrums. 
• Meet your remote product owner once a week instead of every day. 
• Start daily standup meeting even if half of the team is absent.
• Run daily standup meeting before lunch when most of your staff is there. 

Anything can be a solution. If you found it, people are happy and project is going smoothly then you are lucky and can stop reading here. You probably don't need anything more.

If nothing works or you are simply not satisfied how the things go then written reports and Scrum Standup plugin may be an answer.

Problem 2: What was done yesterday.

Have you ever run into one of the following?

• You missed last standup meeting or even worse, you were sick for a few days and feel that you don't know the current state of the project. 
• You get back to work and want to know what happened when you were off. 
• You have a problem and remember that someone fixed similar thing a week ago. Unfortunately your remote team is sleeping right now and you can't find who was that and how to find a fix among tens of SCM commits. 

Again there are many ways to deal with the problem:

• Check activity stream of your JIRA project.
• Go through SCM commits.
• Use JIRA search to find the correct issue or comment.
• Use Assembla/Github/Bitbucket search to find the right commit. 

If it works for you in all cases and you feel you don't need anything more just stop reading here.

If it does not work or you feel you miss something, written reports and Scrum Standup plugin may be an answer again.

That's why we decided to create Scrum Standup plugins for JIRA and Confluene.

You can download and try them from https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/849934
Bugs and feature requests can be raised at: https://jira.spartez.com/jira/browse/SSJ

Enjoy,
Scrum Standup team.