#30 – Jira vs. Azure DevOps

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For many teams and companies, gone are the days where all members of the Scrum team were collocated and everyone could stand around a physical Scrum board and move physical cards with stories is long gone.

Therefore, the tools that support the agile way of working are more important than ever, especially those for managing the delivery of work. Two of the most popular tools for doing this in enterprises is Jira from Atlassian and Azure DevOps from Microsoft, but many other more lightweight alternatives are also available with a varying degree of features.

No matter what tool you chose to support your agile way of working, it’s important to remember that it’s not the tool that makes you agile, it’s your behavior, culture and mindset. You can still hold on to old ways of working, e.g., break down and managing big requirements that are delivered with a waterfallish approach, while using Jira or Azure DevOps. 

If you sense that the agile mindset is lacking, and everyone’s attention is drowning in tooling, try to use a simple tool like Trello and intentionally over-simplify your way of working by taking a just-enough approach to your tooling, so you “free up” energy to focus on the needed behavioral changes. It might be way more beneficial to everyone rather than spending a lot of time analyzing which tool fits your organization the best.