[yuretz]

This is so nicely formulated, thank you so much! I'm just thinking, isn't what you describe the general problem of agile methods/processes, and not Jira's, as it's just one of tools built to assist in agile implementation?

[jakevoytko]

That's an excellent question. To me, the difference is "is agile development part of our process?" or "is agile our entire process?" I once worked on a development team that did a great job of using agile as a narrowly-scoped thing that applied to the act of producing work. They viewed picking their large product and engineering changes through a different lens, which was trying to constantly put yourself on a holistically better footing with both your customers and the engineering codebase. It wasn't "agile" in the sense that it didn't follow any specific methodology - it was top-down, not iterative, etc. But the work to meet the objectives could be done with agile development.

So to me, it's a question of how good teams are at isolating agile development to be scoped to just development. Can they separate strategic thinking (which JIRA basically tries to prevent) from commoditizing development (which JIRA excels at)? If you just rely on the tool that makes work easy, you're not going to get there.

[yuretz]

This makes a lot of sense. Thanks for your answers!