Introduction
JIRA is an Agile and Incident Management Tool used for Project Management, Bug Tracking, Issue Tracking and Workflow.
JIRA is based on the following three concepts.
Issues – Uses to track all the tasks. An issue helps to track all works that underlie in a project
Project – A Project contains issues; a JIRA project can be called as a collection of issues.
Workflow – Workflow is used to track the lifecycle of an Issue
What is an Issue ?
JIRA is a project management tool and uses issues to track all the tasks. An issue helps to track all works that underlie in a project. In real time, every work or task either technical, non-technical, support or any other type of a project in JIRA are logged as an issue.
Issues are the JIRA term for a requirements –
- Epic
- Story
- Defect
- Task
- Sub – Task
- Improvement
- Request
- Almost anything we want!
These are the basic elements of JIRA and they follow a predefined hierarchy
Each Issue has specific fields that hold it’s details and attributes
Common JIRA Agile Issue Types
JIRA Standard Issue Type Hierarchy
JIRA Workflows
In JIRA, workflow is used to track the lifecycle of an Issue. Workflow is a record of statuses and transitions of an issue during its lifecycle. A status represents the stage of an issue at a particular point. An issue can be in only one status at a given point of time like Opened, To Do, Done, Closed, Assigned, etc.
A transition is a link between two statuses when an issue moves from one status to another. For an issue to move between two statuses, a transition must exist. In a simple way, a transition is some kind of work done on the issue, while status is the impact of work on that issue.
Example
As of now, an issue is created and opened. When the assignee starts working on the issue, the issue moves to the In Progress status. Here, the transition is starting the work, while the status of the issue is now progressive.
JIRA workflow has the following stages to track as soon as an issue is created:
Open Issue: After creation, the issue is open and can be assigned to the assignee to start working on it.
In Progress Issue: The assignee has actively started to work on the issue.
Resolved Issue: All sub-tasks and works of that Issue are completed. Now, the issue is waiting to be verified by the reporter. If verification is successful, it will be closed or re-opened, if any further changes are required.
Reopened Issue: This issue was resolved previously, but the resolution was either incorrect or missed a few things or some modifications are required. From Reopened stage, issues are marked either as assigned or resolved.
Close Issue: The issue is considered as finished, resolution is correct as of now. Closed issues can be re-opened later based on the requirement.
JIRA Workflow can be referred as a Defect Lifecycle. It follows the same concepts; the only difference is that it is generic for all issues rather than limited to Defects only.
The following diagram shows a standard workflow:
JIRA Ownership
JIRA uses the concept of ownership
JIRA – Project
A Project contains issues; a JIRA project can be called as a collection of issues. A JIRA Project can be of several types.
For example –
- Software Development Project
- Marketing Project
- Migration to other platform project
- Help Desk Tracking Project
- Leave Request Management System
- Employee Performance System
- Website Enhancement
Project Roles
- Project roles are a flexible way to associate users and groups with a particular project.
- Used in conjunction with Permission Schemes to define access and activity permissions to your project.
- Other roles may be in your instance or be created to support organization needs
Hierarchy of Roles
Projects deliver Products
Important Points to Note
The following points explain some interesting details of JIRA.
- JIRA is an incident management tool
- JIRA is developed by Atlassian Inc., and Australian Company
- JIRA is a platform independent tool: it can be used with any OS.
- JIRA is multi-lingual tool – English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, etc.
- JIRA supports MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and SQL server in backend.
- JIRA can be integrated with many other tools – Subversion, GIT, Clearcase, Team Foundation Software, Mercury, Concurrent Version System and many more.
Agile Frameworks
Scrum Framework
- Scrum is a framework that helps team collaborate when it comes to complex project/products.
- It helps teams learn from their experiences, organize themselves while working on problems, reflect on the victories and losses to help them improve.
- Software development
- Learn through experiences, self-organize and prioritize and reflect on wins and losses to continuously improve.
- Regular, fixed-length sprints ( i.e. two weeks )
- Sprint planning, Sprint, Daily scrum, Sprint review, Sprint retrospective
- Product owner, scrum master, development team
Kanban Framework
- Kanban or Kamban in Japanese, which translates to “Signboard” is visual system that is used for managing work as it goes through the process.
- Kanban can help determine bottlenecks and then fix them in a cost-effective manner and optimal speeds. This is done with the help of Kanban board.
- Kanban involves having work being split into pieces and the work is item is written on a note/card and put on a board
- The columns help illustrate where each item is in the workflow
- Lean manufacturing
- Use visuals to improve work-in-progress
- Continuous flow
- Visualize the flow of work, limit work –in progress, manage flow, incorporate feedback loops
- No required roles
License and Free Trial
The following points describes the legalities of the JIRA Tool.
- JIRA is a commercial tool and available as a Trial version for a limited time.
- To utilize JIRA services, a license is required.
- JIRA provides free license for academic projects.
- JIRA is a free product for organizations that fall under non-academic, non-commercial, non-governmental, non-political, non-profit, and secular categories.
- A 15-day trial version is available for an individual person to use.
Use of JIRA
Following are some of the most significant uses of JIRA.
- JIRA is widely used by the project development team to track the effort spent on each issue and its workflow.
- JIRA is used in Bugs, Issues and Change Request Tracking.
- JIRA can be used in Helpdesk, Support and Customer Services to create tickets and track the resolution and status of the created tickets.
- JIRA is useful in Project Management, Task Tracking and Requirement Management.
- JIRA is very useful in Workflow and Process management.
- JIRA is used as a tool to track the incidents in incident management and issue management.
Test Management Tool – All testing activities
Defect Tracking Tool – Bug reporting and tracking
Agile Tool – Design of automated agile process
Jira, VersionOne, Teamcity…
JIRA –
JIRA is an agile management tool. JIRA is a project management tool.