Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) with Jira

WSJF? Read this short intro. If you are wondering how to do WSJF with Jira, read on.

It took me 1.5 hours to get WSJF working on a fresh Jira Cloud evaluation version. On-premise Jira has a different set of plugins, so a slightly different path is needed. However, it is quite simple to get this running – provided you can bribe your Jira admin to install a new plugin!

This is how it works

In the listing

This was done with the Abacus plugin that allows you to do math based on values “fields”. All of the above is automatically calculated by the Abacus plugin. Any time you change any of the WSJF components, the plugin recalculates it automatically.

The summing of Business Value, Risk Reduction/Opportunity Enablement and Time Criticality was at first calculated as the “WSJS Sum of BV + RR/OE + TC” column. The WSJF result had also division by job size/duration included. In my opinion, pricing of the plugin was bearable.

If you need a similar one with the on-premise Jira, then look at JIRA Misc Custom Fields.

So that’s short and sweet, hope this gets you started.

This blog post was first published in anttitevanlinna’s blog.

AUTHOR

Antti Tevanlinna is a seasoned change artist. He is working to build self-organizing, adaptive, and fast organizations as a Senior Lean Agile Coach at Nitor. You can read more of his thoughts at https://anttitevanlinna.wordpress.com/.