Shape Up Board for Jira gives software agencies a competitive advantage

An interesting trend is emerging for Curious Lab’s Shape Up Board for Jira plugin: software development agencies are using it as a unique selling point to win projects.

The plugin’s distinct progress visualization is a wow factor that is being used to attract clients’ attention.

Clients are always concerned about deadlines, and the Shape Up Board for Jira plugin is the perfect answer for it. It’s a development tool intended to help with deadlines.

Before we go further, I need to step back a bit and explain what Shape Up is.

Shape Up is a new software development approach “invented” by Basecamp, the same company that created the famous Rails framework.

At its core, Basecamp’s Shape Up is about helping software teams ship on time.

If you implement the Shape Up method correctly, you will never miss a deadline again. I have tried this myself. It’s not theoretical. My team and I met an ambitious deadline with the help of Shape Up.

Shape Up teaches 3 main principles to be in control of deadlines:

Make deadline a fixed goal

Make the deadline the primary non-negotiable goal, and everything else secondary and flexible. Instead of saying “We will deliver this exact solution in 2 months” our engineers and designers flip it and say “We have 2 months, we’ll figure out some kind of solution (flexible) that can be delivered in that time frame.”

As an engineer, I used to hate the idea of making deadline such a big deal but I’ve changed my mind.

These days when I speak with a client, I ask them “Which one do you want more? That this ships in 2 months, or having this particular solution design?” Nine times out of ten, their time requirement is fixed, but the solution shape is flexible.

Eliminate late surprises

Try your best to identify rabbit holes and land mines when designing your solution. Eliminate surprises that can trip up your developers and designers late in the game.

Sequence pieces of work correctly

During the building (coding) phase, use a visual progress tracker called the “hill chart” to form the habit of tackling the riskiest and hardest work first, and saving easy work for last.

This is where the Shape Up for Jira plugin comes in. It provides the “hill chart” element of the Shape Up practice. It lets your developers drag story circles along the hill to indicate their progress.

Because the hill has an initial uphill slope, it reminds your developers to work on hard stories first. If they start a project feeling “cruisy”, that’s a red flag, it means they’ve picked the wrong pieces of work. The start of a project should always feel difficult, like pushing boulders uphill.

To conquer deadlines, the trick is to move all stories to the top of the hill (the safe point) as quickly as possible. Once this is achieved, being able to meet a deadline is pretty much a given. Worst case scenario a few polish tasks will have to be dropped at the end, which is not the end of the world at all.

Final words

The ability to meet deadlines is important for any team but it is especially critical for software development agencies.

For an agency business, the costs of time blowouts are very dear. It can cause reputation damage, loss of contract, and unpleasant shouting matches between clients and employees.

Embracing Shape Up will make your agency work better. Utilizing Shape Up for Jira will help you win more clients.