Scrum Team Using Trackers
It seems that my team is using excel trackers apart from using Jira. Upon further investigation it seems that the excel tracker has more detailed items then what is in Jira. I have had a 2 retro's on this before and asked the team if there is anything that they see in excel that they do not see in Jira because I could customized our Jira instance to meet their requirements. Just to give some context, my team is a team of business & technical individuals. The technical side have a daily technical meeting to align on technical details which is outside of the daily scrum. The business side also has their own business meetings as well though more adhoc in nature. Scrum has no restrictions on have meetings outside of scrum so this is fine because we do have our daily scrum and other scrum ceremonies as per scrum. I have coached the team on using the agreed on tool for tracking work. For any working items that the team needs to discuss in external meetings they create an Epic to have those discussions and add work to the specific Epic. For example the business Business has a Business discussion Epic and when they are brainstorming on requirements that may need to get added to the backlog they use that Epic. The Technical side has and Epic as well to do the same but for some reason they are not using it. All of this was decided in our team working agreements. This has no affect on the PO's ability to prioritize the backlog as we have worked with our PO to find a process that works. The Process is that the POs has fully visibility of the Epics as he/she should and when we do refinement we look at those Epics first and the entire team discusses the items and the PO determines the value and if we should work on it or can it. Then we focus on the other Epics as per usual. Seems that the technical side is not adhering to the established team working agreement that they agreed too. Of course I know that I need to coach them but I want to know if there is anyone that has this issues and what helped resolve it.
It seems that my team is using excel trackers apart from using Jira. Upon further investigation it seems that the excel tracker has more detailed items then what is in Jira.
Is it clear which of these is the single source of truth for the Product Backlog, and is it clear to everyone that the Product Owner has authority over this artifact?
Seems that the technical side is not adhering to the established team working agreement that they agreed too.
Given that the PO has authority over the Product Backlog, and appears to be satisfied with the way it is managed, perhaps framing an agreement between so-called "sides" is just proving to be unhelpful.
Would anyone understand or need the information that is in the Excel tracker other than the Developers? If not, then what is the problem. The Developers decide how they do the work. If having a detailed record outside of Jira is useful to them and they are consistently delivering usable increments of value, why would it matter?
So the problem that in the middle of active sprints items we frequently are missing work because they were not created as stories in Jira. Once its been identified (Usually mid sprint) it causes a scope creep. I have asked to maybe incorporate the excel sheet in refinement, however, I get push back from the technical side.
It seems like there is a little understanding about who makes a decisions with a team.
It a SCRUM team, who makes decision about the process they desire to use while developing the product, not Scrum master or PO
So if Scrum team prefers to use Excel, or uses it as an additional software, its entirely THEIR decision which they are fully entitled to.
Jira is merely a tool, which can or can be used depending how team feels
Having said that, I must said that excel was and still is one of the best tools to use for Scrum.
Personally I recommend starting with excel, not Jira for new born Scrum teams