Jan Einfach: Agile and Atlassian explained | A short introduction to “Agile Hive – SAFe with Atlassian Tools”

Agile Hive - the perfect SAFe solution for your growing business

Are you thinking about implementing the scaled agile framework (SAFe) in order to meet your business needs? Curious about how Atlassian tools can help you achieve your goals?

Agile Hive is a SAFe solution that uses Atlassian tools, but that's not all. By also working with Jira and Confluence, Agile Hive actually expands the functional scope of Jira in the process. This supports all four levels of SAFe configurations are supported - from essential SAFe though to full SAFe.

The SAFe hierarchy

In this highlight I help show you how Agile Hive breaks down your SAFe into its three main levels: portfolio, program, and team. Here in our example instance, I show you how to drill down through our example epics and features in order to find out exactly what our team is doing for each respective feature as well as what is planned for the future. Then we zoom out as we admire the beautiful overview of the hierarchy as a whole. Full transparency is very important because it's one of the four core SAFe values.

This hierarchy is built completely automatically with the help of our linking function, which we will get into in the next highlight.

The power of links

With Agile Hive, you can effortlessly create and set links that you can connect directly to your artifacts on Jira boards. In the video I show you an example team board and I demonstrate how to link my team enabler or my story simply by using drag and drop. Links automatically use the same color, helping you visually organize your boards with ease.

I also show how to link to higher level artifacts, how to use a hyper loop, and how to use drag and drop to establish an epic portfolio link. Using this drag and drop feature is not only easy to use and elegant to look at, but also the SAFe process hierarchy system rejects any links which are incorrect. This means that you can never link a portfolio epic directly to a story in the hierarchy with nothing in between.

SAFe reporting gadgets

In the video I show you an example of our SAFe reporting dashboard, which includes three gadgets. The first gadget shows the actual epic progress. Below that we see storyboards from stories found at a low level that we can now manage from the high epic portfolio level. From this vantage point we will also be able to see exactly how many story points have already been completed or are in progress.

There are nine different reporting gadgets for Agile Hive in total, including predictions, burn downs, burn ups, and more. There are reports for every level.

PI planning and dependencies

Last but not least we are going to look at PI planning and dependencies in Agile Hive. Here we use blue containers to represent the actual and incremental sub-containers to organize features and enablers that we have planned. We can again use the drag and drop function effortlessly to organize this.

Columns are for sprints and cells are for sprint contents, which can also be organized using drag and drop. I demonstrate how we use colored lines in order to indicate dependencies, the order in which things have been done or are to be done. Every time we plan, we need to set a sprint capacity, which of course can vary from sprint to sprint. Agile Hive lets you adjust capacities for every sprint, for every project.

Try Agile Hive today

Agile Hive helps you organize your teams with easy to use drag and drop controls, beautifully designed color schemes, and intuitive linking schemes. Your business is growing, and so the scope and complexity of your planning are expanding with it. It's time to get SAFe. With Agile Hive, you'll have the tools you need to implement and manage your scaled agile framework all within a beautifully designed interface.

Further information

Agile hive website with information on features and prices
Planning in SAFe® – always a talking point
Agile Hive, scaling agile methods, SAFe software integration and more – Interview with Brandon Huff (cPrime)
Linchpin partnership, Agile Hive, Confluence extranets - an interview with Christian Lane (Praecipio)

Spacecraft - The ultimate theming tool for Confluence Spacecraft - The ultimate theming tool for Confluence Spacecraft - The ultimate theming tool for Confluence

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