Why Magnets Are Better Than Jira

In the popular series “What tools do to our way of working”, here’s a rather uneven fight: magnets versus Jira.

Good morning.

In the good old days, when agile teams worked together in one place, boards consisted of whiteboards that you could not only write on but also use with magnets. Tickets were made of paper, and each team member had one (and only one) magnet with a photo of themselves stuck to it.

From time to time, someone would get up, move a card to another column, drag a ticket from “To do” over to “In progress,” and – most importantly – fix the card with their own magnet. Everyone immediately knew who was working on what. One glance was enough. Cards in “To do” were tasks for the team, and anyone could freely pick one.

Today, teams work with Jira, and some believe that the equivalent of the magnet is the “Assignee” field. Far from it. What I see today typically looks like this:

• Team A assigns tickets to people already during sprint planning. Sometimes every developer already has “their” ten tickets right after planning.

• In Team B, a developer assembles “their” sprint even before planning; after a few minutes in the meeting, they’ll say something like, with a tone that feels a lot like “do whatever you want, I’m out”: “Well, my sprint is already full.”

• Team C has understood cross-functional teams to mean that work packages should be cut strictly along individual skills. And so they assign the assignee already during refinement.

Overall, I can say that for years now I’ve only seen teams where people have dozens of magnets (aka assignees). Or, as I see it, where people are possessed by the magnets.

Their own face stares back at them from countless places saying: “Work faster in the feature factory, the assembly line is running and running and the next tickets are already rolling toward you!”

Sprint goals, teamwork, value-creating work?

No time for that nonsense, I have to keep implementing.

If you want to escape the feature factory, you should try the following (and combining the suggestions is allowed):

• Each person may appear as an assignee at most once at any given time.

• Assignees may only exist in columns where actual work is happening (“In progress,” “Pull request,” “In testing,” or similar) – never in “To do” or earlier.

These two suggestions require discipline. Discipline is great, but usually fails once people are involved. Which is why here comes the ultimate tip:

Delete the “Assignee” field in Jira.

Radical? That depends on what it’s being used for. If it only serves to feed the assembly line of the feature factory, then: get rid of it!

Until next time.

This article was originally published on heise.de in the german version.