How to Optimize Sprint Execution Workflows With Unito
It’s one thing to get your backlog organized, it’s another to get everything in it done. Individual developers have to deal with replicating sneaky bugs and hunt for renegade semicolons in walls of code. As a team, they need to collaborate to regularly clear the backlog while hitting milestones and producing deliverables on-time. That collection of spinning plates is usually balanced by a team lead or a project manager.
That’s the essence of the sprint execution workflow; getting a request from backlog to finished. One of the main challenges of optimizing these workflows is negotiating the tool differences (e.g., ServiceNow and Azure DevOps) between individual developers, team leads, and stakeholders across the organization. Here’s how you can do that with Unito.
Crossing the finish line every time
Whether your development team is focused on fixing bugs or building new features, they always have plenty to keep them busy. Keeping your team agile means giving them the ability to report on and adjust to unexpected hurdles. It means empowering leaders to see what’s happening with their teams in real-time and giving them the tools to act.
Reporting on initiatives and dispatching work are at the heart of this workflow. This typically crosses tool boundaries. Development team leads often use a work management tool while their developers generally live in a Git platform. That’s why visibility is one of the big hurdles this workflow has to leap over.
The workflow without Unito
Tool disparity is the default for this workflow. Programming for a living product — like a SaaS tool — makes version control an essential part of a developer’s tech stack. But version control software isn’t usually suited to the needs of team leads and project managers. On top of this, product teams might use a different work management tool from the rest of the organization.
This tool disparity creates bottlenecks whenever information needs to get to and from a development team. In a smaller organization, individual developers might be expected to field questions and requests through chat software or email. The constant notifications and back-and-forth can quickly become overwhelming. In larger companies, a team lead or project manager is usually responsible for replying to requests. That often means they’re keeping an eye on multiple tools and wasting time sifting through endless tasks for the right update.
And forget about reporting to stakeholders. A team lead who’s expected to keep everyone updated on what their developers are doing can spend hours each week compiling throwaway reports and sitting in meetings.
Where Unito comes in
Unito eliminates the primary cause for these issues: tool disparity. By combining a straightforward, visual workflow designer with the deepest integrations on the market, Unito turns individual, siloed tools into a single collaborative environment.
With Unito, developers don’t have to leave their version control software. Team leads can rely on the automatic syncing of multiple platforms, meaning they can have access to everyone’s updates from their tool of choice. Meanwhile, reports on key project deliverables can be automatically delivered to stakeholders without intervention from anyone else. That means less busywork, no more jumping between tools, and absolutely no copy-paste.
Here’s how it works.
Sending updates and pull requests from GitHub to Jira
Syncing a GitHub repository with a Jira project can be done with just a couple of clicks. By using the workflow designer, you can also map out your workflow visually, adding as many repositories as needed to represent your workflow. In this case, I’ve just added the one.
By just following the on-screen prompts, you can connect your Jira project with a GitHub repository, and watch as GitHub issues and pull requests are sent to Jira as issues.
Issue descriptions, comments, assignees, and labels are automatically synced between both tools in real-time, meaning you can keep things organized without any extra manual work. No complicated settings to fine-tune, no intricate recipes to set up.
But you don’t have to stop at default settings. With rules, you can filter issues by label, if you want to make sure only high-priority issues reach the team lead in Jira. Alternatively, maybe you want to make sure all pull requests from a fresh new junior developer get synced to Jira for an extra review before they’re approved.
With Unito, you have access to a robust platform that gives you the ability to tailor the depth of your workflows to the work you need to get done.
Getting key information to stakeholders
But wait, what if you need to get critical product updates to stakeholders across the organization? All you need to do is steal a trick from the project reporting workflow: the key deliverables block.
You can use Unito to sync your Jira project to the Asana, Trello, or other tool used by key stakeholders. You can share updates on key deliverables to those tools, filtering for pertinent Jira tasks with a label. Something like “Key Deliverable” usually does the trick.
From there, just add a block of work representing this new tool to your workflow. When setting up a flow between the two, just make sure to add a rule that filters for that label. That way, only Jira issues with a “Key Deliverable” label will make it to your stakeholders.
Here’s an example of what a Trello board, populated with key deliverables from blocks across the organization, might look like.
And here’s what that looks like in the workflow designer.
It’s really that simple.
The finish line
Executing a sprint goes beyond the abilities of individual developers. They need support from their leaders, and that means transparent communication. Tool disparity makes that much more complicated. By using a workflow management solution like Unito, you’re making sure information gets to where it needs to go, without copy-pasting or jumping between tools.
What’s next?
1. Ready to start? Try Unito free for 14 days!
2. See the power of Unito in action.
3. Read more about what Unito can do for your workflow.