Using JIRA for Waterfall Project Planning

[Rolondo Talbott]

We are implementing Agile-Fall in my organization. 2 weeks sprints as we progress towards a defined Project End Date. In excel, we took the user stories and divided them evenly throughout a series of date bound, two week sprints, until we reached the Project End Date. Of course, this did not account for the size and complexity of the stories and led to a lot of scheduling.

In JIRA, we seek to do the same sort of Project Planning - plan out the entire projects in sprints but, I am looking for a way to do either What-IF analysis or an easy way to reschedule stories to determine Project End dates. 

We are currently using the Version Report to determine potential Project Completion dates due to velocity but that is based on at least 10% of done tasks but, are there any other thoughts on how to provide this type of visibility. 

I am sure there are questions but any help will be appreciated. 

[Randy]

If you have a fixed scope and fixed launch date, why bother with 2 week sprints and the overhead of opening/closing sprints and shifting items in and out of each sprint?  Using the version report for forecasting your tracking takes the historical average of your pace to forecast out.  Is a 50% certainty (average) of launching vs not launching acceptable odds? :)

[Rolondo Talbott]

Thank you for the feedback. I think it comes down more to a difference between the teams wanting to work more in an Agile fashion while the community (who has never been exposed to a framework) gradually changes from a traditional waterfall approach to a more Agile one.

Any thoughts on how this can be achieved in JIRA?

[Randy]

Good news is that you have options with JIRA.  Especially if you want to transition to a more agile approach to software development and releases.

What are you trying to address or achieve with agile?  What about your current waterfall approach do you want to change and why?