Jira is a useful computer tool made by Atlassian, a company from Australia. It’s like a digital helper for teams, helping them work together smoothly. With Jira, teams can do important things, such as keeping track of problems, managing projects, and making work more straightforward. It acts as a kind of assistant, making teamwork easier. This tool is especially handy for keeping everyone on the same page when working on tasks and projects. So, Jira is like a friend that teams can count on to stay organized and get their work done well.
Key Jira Concepts
Jira is built on four important ideas: issue, project, board, and workflow.
Issue
An issue is like a single task you keep an eye on from the start until it’s finished. This task could be a problem, a story you’re working on, a big task, something the HR team needs to do, or a document the documentation team has to create.
Some people might call issues requests, tickets, or tasks, but it’s better to stick with issues or the specific types you define to avoid confusion.
Most product teams usually use issue types like Epic, Story, Bug, Test, and Task.
Projects A project is a way to bring together your issues and the shared information and context that connect those issues. You can set up issues related to a project in different ways, like limiting who can see them and using specific workflows.
When you use Jira for your product development, it’s useful to have one project for each product.
Boards
A board in Jira is like a visual map of how your team works on a project. You can use different boards to see, manage, and report on the work happening in the same project in flexible ways.
If you follow an agile approach, you might like using a Kanban Board to watch backlog items as they get clearer and a Sprint Board to show the tasks for your current sprint.
Workflows
A workflow is like the path that issues follow as they move through your project from start to finish.
Each label in a workflow, like To Do, In Progress, In Review, In Testing, QA Done and Done, shows a status that an issue can have. You can set up workflows to control how issues move between different statuses and make things happen when an issue moves into a status.