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· 4 min read
Roy Russo

Why is backlog maintenance important?​

Maintaining a backlog, frankly just sucks.

It's a tedious task that teams rarely enjoy doing, but left unattended, will almost certainly lead to a variety of negative effects. I've often witnessed in my career that diagnosing a team's (product + engineering) inability to deliver on time, requires me to look at the backlog first!

The purpose of regularly maintaining (or grooming) a backlog is to ensure that the backlog is always up-to-date and that the team is always working on the most important issues. This is especially important for teams that are working on multiple projects at once, as it can be difficult to keep track of all the issues that need to be addressed.

Failure to maintain a backlog is a common occurence I've witnessed in my career and the effects can manifest in a variety of ways. However, the most common effects are:

  • The team is working on issues that are not the most important (lack of prioritization)
  • Product Management is unable to provide accurate estimates on when a feature will be delivered (lack of estimation) to customers and management.

· 5 min read
Roy Russo

What is Issue Churn?​

In the context of Agile software development, issue churn is a metric that can be used to measure the efficiency of a team.

Issue churn is a term used to describe the amount (issues or points) that have rolled over from one sprint to the next.

It is a measure of the amount of work that has not been completed in a given sprint. The higher the churn count, the less efficient the team is.

It's also important to represent Issue Churn as a Rate... that is, the amount of stories that are rolled over from one sprint to the next compared to the total number of stories that were planned for the sprint. This is a more accurate representation of the team's efficiency.

tip

Some Issue Churn is Ok

It's important to note that some issue churn is ok. In fact, it's expected. The goal is to minimize churn as much as possible, but it's not always possible to eliminate it completely.

· One min read
Roy Russo

New Docs How-To Section​

We recently added a new section to our online documentation called How-To. This section is designed to help you get the most out of NitroIQ by providing you with step-by-step instructions on how to use NitroIQ to diagnose and address common problems in Jira and developer performance.

The How-To section is broken down into distinct categories that mirror the functionality in the application. For example, if you are having issues with issue churn, you can navigate to the Diagnosing Issue Churn page to learn how to use NitroIQ to diagnose and address issue churn.

Future plans are to have these How-To articles linked directly from the application itself, so that you can quickly access them when you need them in the context of the application page you are on.

· 3 min read
Roy Russo

Live on the Atlassian Marketplace​

NitroIQ Marketplace Page >

After several months of work, NitroIQ is generally available to the public on the Atlassian Marketplace. (Visit the page for a gallery of images and a short video)

NitroIQ is the JIRA plugin I always wanted and never had the time to build. After leaving my last job, I finally had the opportunity to work on a tool that would unlock the data hidden behind the JIRA scrum boards. Managing teams at scale and trying to find out where the bottlenecks are, which sprints perform better than others (and why), and which team members perform better than others (and why) is a difficult prospect in JIRA, and the included reporting doesn't help at all in this regard.

Why NitroIQ?​

JIRA data is locked behind a lot of API calls and individual issue changelogs. I needed a way to parse all of this data and distill it down in simple to use charts and tables that answered those pressing questions that allowed me to unblock and tune my teams and processes for maximum efficiency.

So what questions is NitroIQ seeking to answer?

  • Where are my bottlenecks in process, statuses, teams, etc...?
  • Are issue bouncing back-and-forth between statuses and teams?
  • Are we spending most of our time as a company working on bugs and not innovating?
  • What percentage of issues is rolling over sprint-over-sprint?
  • What is the state of the backlog? Issue age and readiness to work on.
  • Which team members are performing the most consistently sprint-over-sprint?

· 3 min read
Roy Russo

What is NitroIQ?​

NitroIQ is a JIRA plugin (only available by invite-only currently) that helps Agile teams improve performance through insights, scorecards, and metrics powered by machine learning.

It's purpose is two-fold:

  1. Answer basic questions that engineering leaders and teams need to know about their performance sprint-over-sprint.
  2. Using machine learning and decades of combined experience, recommend ways to improve processes.

NitroIQ is in Private Beta​

We've had NitroIQ installed with friendly software organizations for a few months now, and the feedback has helped a lot in mapping out our next steps.

Being in private beta has fed the team important information, we would not have otherwise had, such as:

  • Product-Market fit. Is this useful?
  • Price sensitivity. What is this worth to you?
  • Roadmap feedback. What would you like to see in the next version?

Additionally, every shop seems to configure JIRA differently, so building a tool that seemlessly plugs into an existing configuration and does not require changes in JIRA was nice to have pulled off.