Tools that you can use

You can use a number of tools to support, automate, and visualize the process. Jira and Agilefant are well-known web-based solutions that can help you define epics, stories, estimates, and sprints. Most tools also have an option to add (sub) tasks to stories. Although a story should be the smallest amount of work possible, it can still be useful to pide them into multiple subtasks.

You can find more information about Jira at https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira. Agilefant can be found at https://www.agilefant.com.

The following is an example of Jira displaying a Kanban Board. Jira comes with good support for Agile and Scrum in particular, while Agilefant is more method agnostic:

If you just got started, you might not need all these tools yet. In that case, a whiteboard and a number of post-its are sufficient to create your first Kanban board. This board comes in handy when all members of your team work in the same space. When you have a distributed team, Trello is a good choice. It is not as advanced as Jira, as it does not have support for Scrum, but it is a great way to get started in an organized way.

To start with Trello, sign up at https://trello.com/, create a new team and project, and you are ready to start. Just as is the case with Jira, you can create multiple lanes in Trello, each reflecting the actual state of a card/item. As said before, you can start with a To do, Doing, and a Done lane. However, you soon will find out that these states alone are not going to be sufficient.

If you configure the following lanes, you will have a decent start for an agile workflow in Trello:

• Backlog
• Ready (the story is clear, well understood, and has no impediments)
• In development (developing and testing)
• Test
• Done (it has been tested and approved)

It may look like the following example. You can also add more lanes to it, such as code review, or whatever suits your organization best:

All stories start as a card in the Backlog lane. Once you have clearly defined what the objectives are, the story is ready for development. You can then move the card to the Ready lane. When a developer picks up the story, he will move the card to the Development lane. At the moment, the implementation has been completed and the unit test(s) for the story succeed the card will be moved again, for example, to the Test lane or, optionally, to the Code review lane first:

If a manual or automated UI test for the implemented feature succeeds, then the story can be considered as done, which correspond to the final lane.

This is, of course, just a simplified process, and tools such as Jira offer much better support for Agile and Scrum workflows, including epics and estimations. Nevertheless, Trello is still a good start for newbies. Trello comes with options to add labels and to define an expiration date and time. You can use it for multiple purposes, even to set epics and estimations, as shown in the preceding screenshot. The epics appear as green labels and the estimated story points appear in blue.

In the later chapters, you will read about other tools that can help you to organize an agile workflow. Think of Confluence. Just like Jira, it is a Jetbrains web-based solution that allows you to organize all of your documentation and discussions.