Agile tools for software teams
Jira Software supports any agile project management methodology for software development
Fit your framework
Jira Software is an agile project management tool that supports any agile methodology, be it scrum, kanban, or your own unique flavor. From agile boards to reports, you can plan, track, and manage all your agile software development projects from a single tool. Pick a framework to see how Jira Software can help your team release higher quality software, faster.
Agile tools for scrum
Scrum is an agile methodology where products are built in a series of fixed-length iterations. There are four pillars that bring structure to this framework: sprint planning, stand ups (also called daily scrums), sprints, and retrospectives. Out-of-the-box, Jira Software comes with a comprehensive set of agile tools that help your scrum team perform these events with ease.

Scrum board
Scrum boards are used to visualize all the work in a given sprint. Jira Software's scrum boards can be customized to fit your team's unique workflow. You can also easily add things like swimlanes to separate epics, assignees, projects, and more. At the end of the sprint, get a quick snapshot of all the issues that were completed and any unfinished issues will automatically move into the backlog to be addressed in the next sprint planning meeting.
Better retrospectives with scrum reports
Jira Software has a number of agile reports specific for scrum teams. For example, Burndown and Velocity charts, give your team critical insight into their agile process. Reports make retrospectives more data-driven and highlight areas to improve for upcoming sprints.
Burndown chart
Track the total work remaining and project the likelihood of achieving the sprint goal. This helps your team manage its progress and respond accordingly.
Sprint report
Understand the work completed or pushed back to the backlog in each sprint. This helps you determine if your team is overcommitting or if there is excessive scope creep.
Velocity chart
Track the amount of work completed from sprint to sprint. This helps you determine your team's velocity and estimate the work your team can realistically achieve in future sprints.
Cumulative flow diagram
A cumulative flow diagram shows the number of issues in each status. The team can easily spot blockages by seeing the number of issues that increase in any given state.
Epic report
Understand the progress towards completing an epic over time. This helps you manage your team's progress by tracking the remaining incomplete/unestimated work.
Control chart
See the cycle time for your product, version or sprint. This helps you identify whether data from the current process can be used to determine future performance.
Epic burndown
Track the projected number of sprints required to complete an epic. This helps you monitor whether the epic will release on time, so you can take action if work is falling behind.
Release burndown
Track the projected release date for a version. This helps you monitor whether the version will release on time, so you can take action if work is falling behind.
Version report
Track the projected release date for a version. This helps you monitor whether the version will release on time, so you can take action if the work is falling behind.
Agile tools for kanban
Kanban methodology is based on the idea of continuous releases. Work is tracked using a kanban board that displays the statuses of work in columns and lanes. There are four important pillars to kanban to help teams ship products: continuous releases, WIP (work in progress) limits, the list of work, and columns or lanes. Here are some tools that come out-of-the-box in Jira Software to help you run kanban with your team.

Kanban board
Kanban boards give your team full visibility into what’s next, so when one work item (or card) is completed, the team can quickly move on. Historically, a kanban board was a physical board with Post-it notes or cards to represent the work items. Jira Software has virtual kanban boards that contains all the details for each work item, while only displaying the most pertinent information on the board itself.
Agile reports for kanban
Jira Software has a number of out-of-the-box reports and pre-installed gadgets to help your team track cycle time for your product releases. See statuses of issues over time or if data from your current process can be used to predict future performance. Gadgets can display summary information about project/issue data on your dashboard, providing a central location for quick access to this information. Here are some of the kanban reports that come with Jira Software.
Cumulative flow diagram
A cumulative flow diagram shows the number of issues in each status. The team can easily spot blockages by seeing the number of issues that increase in any given state.
Control chart
See the cycle time for your product or version. This helps you identify whether data from the current process can be used to determine future performance.
Mixed methodologies
Some agile teams have adopted mixed methodologies to support how their team works. For example, scrumban takes fixed length sprints and roles from scrum and the focus on WIP (work in progress) limits and cycle time from kanban. Or kanplan, which is kanban with a backlog. Jira Software features can be mixed up to help these teams without constraints of their tools.
Here's a break down of our agile features and what agile methodology they support. Not sure which framework is right for you? Learn more about agile project management.
Agile tools | Scrum | Kanban | Scrumban | Kanplan |
---|---|---|---|---|
Agile boards | ||||
Backlog management | ||||
Project and issue tracking | ||||
Agile reports | ||||
Custom workflows |
Agile at scale
Scaling agile is on the minds of many enterprises as they try to find a way to increase productivity across their entire portfolio, while reducing waste. Frameworks that sit on top of methodologies like scrum or kanban have been developed to address scaling agile. For example, Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and Large-scale Scrum (LeSS) which incorporates scaling guidelines without losing the original scrum principles, or SAfe® which allows for scaling development work across all levels of an enterprise.
Portfolio for Jira plus Jira Software can be used for these frameworks by allowing you to combine your long-term planning and agile development to get visibility at scale.