What is the relationship between Jira, bigpicture, agile and Trello?

[Sharon Eaton]

I'm trying to work out how to use BigPicture in Trello and many of the help tutorials and discussions refer to Jira and Agile - what is this? 

Does anyone know where I can find help on how to use BigPicture in Trello?

I've watched the video but it does not answer all my questions and I cant find answers among the Jira / Agile noise.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Starting with the basics:

• Trello is a board - you put things on it in columns to help you keep track of them, and move them between columns as needed
• Jira is an issue tracker - it has a workflow, fields, user tracking, timelogs, reporting etc
• Agile is a methodology for running projects and systems.  Both Trello and Jira enable you to do some of the methods, but for many of the more advanced stuff, you'd use Jira Software (a layer on top of Jira that gives you the Agile boards)
• BigPicture is an app that adds functions to help people get overviews of the stuff they are tracking.

I'm not sure that you need help with BigPicture on Trello - why have you selected that, if you're not sure what it does?  Could you explain what you're looking for, so we can either tell you you've got the right idea and help you where you're stuck, or point you at something more suitable?

[Sharon Eaton]

Trello and BigPicture are new to me and I am trying to work out how to use them. 

When I search for help on how to set it up and get it going, most of the answers mention Jira and Agile. I don't know what they are, I don't use them but I'm somehow expected to know about them. I would like to get help on Trello and BigPicture without the noise of instructions on how to use things that are, to me, irrelevant. If they are always going to be mentioned within help, I at least needed to know, roughly, what on earth they are, so thank you.

To be honest, I would prefer not to know anything about Jira and Agile, just to get help on Trello and BigPicture as learning about 2 new systems and how they interact is more than enough to cope with at one time.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Makes sense.   I would simply ignore the Jira stuff and concentrate on Trello.

Trello is not horrendously complex (a criticism I would use for Jira, although the complexity is there because of the power behind it).  I find most people get working with it fine after a few rummages through https://trello.com/en-GB/guide.  In fact, most only do a couple and find it useful (101 and creating a board, and possibly the teams one).  The others are useful, but usually only after you've discovered a need for them.

Once you've got the hang of sticking cards on the board and moving them around, then I'd move on to the BigPicture power-up - that add a load of planning stuff on top of the board, but I'd recommend having a bit of time with plain Trello before trying to use it.  Start that with https://trello.com/power-ups/5b30f2417825075d3e126cbb/bigpicture and use the links.  You will find that talks about Jira a bit, but you can basically ignore those references.