From the course: Jira Core Concepts and Advanced Features by Pearson

Jira core concepts and features - Jira Tutorial

From the course: Jira Core Concepts and Advanced Features by Pearson

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Jira core concepts and features

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Before we start to dive into the more demonstration-heavy parts of this course, let's get a good understanding of the most central core concepts and features of JIRA. In terms of the key concepts, JIRA is a project status and planning tool. So of course, one of JIRA's most central concepts is that of a project. A project you create in JIRA probably parallels pretty closely to a real-world project in your workplace. If your company has a project to build a customer intake software system, and you want to support that project with JIRA, you'd create a project for it in JIRA. Projects in JIRA aren't hierarchical. You can't have sub-projects. But of course, you can create multiple projects to track different parts of a business initiative. For any project, of course, there are individual work items that you want to plan for and track. For instance, in our customer intake system, we might know we need to build functionality to enter customer information, and also functionality to search for customers. Things you want to track the status of within a project in JIRA are called Issues, or at least until a couple of days ago, after decades of their most core concept in JIRA being called an issue in mid-2025 for Jira Cloud, at least, they've decided to call issues work items. In Jira Data Center, it's still issues. For most of this course, I'm going to be saying issues, because it's a very old habit and I'm stubborn. Just know that in Jira Cloud, the term work item means the same as issue. A project can, of course, have many issues in it, and the project is the owner of those issues. An issue can only belong to a single project. But each issue in JIRA has an issue type, and those help JIRA apply to any type of project. For instance, for an Agile software development project, you can have issue types or work item types, if you absolutely must, of Story, Bug, Epic, and Task. For a project in JIRA supporting some other type of effort, you may have a completely different set of issue types, maybe customer request or policy proposal, whatever you need. Any issue you create in JIRA has fields that allow you to capture information about that issue. A summary, who the issue is assigned to, priority, attachments, and some fields may vary by issue type. For instance, a story in an Agile software development project might have a field for a story point estimate, but other issue types might not. All issue types in JIRA will have a status field that tells you where that issue is in terms of progress. That relates to the workflow of the issue. A project in JIRA can have one or more workflows associated with it. And those workflows describe the set of statuses that issues in the project can transition between. For instance, a workflow might say that issues in the project go from to do, to in progress, to done. or maybe they go from proposed to either accepted or rejected. When you create a project, you'll get a combination of these concepts out-of-the-box at project creation time, but they're all customizable. So in JIRA, you can create entirely new and custom issue types, entirely new fields, entirely new statuses and workflows. The ability to customize central concepts like this is key to JIRA's adaptability to different types of efforts. The last key concept we'll discuss up front are JIRA boards. A board in JIRA, at least what JIRA calls an active board, is a visual representation of work that's currently in progress for a project. Back in the old days of Agile software development, we'd have a whiteboard in the team room with cards stuck onto the whiteboard in different columns based on their status. So cards would flow from left to right on the whiteboard as they were worked on and completed. This is what a JIRA Active Board is. And a project's issues can be displayed on multiple boards. But when you create most types of projects in JIRA, you'll get a starter board. Don't worry if you have questions about these concepts, as we're going to be exploring and demonstrating all of these in depth during this course. This is just a foundational preview, if you will. From a feature perspective, of course, JIRA's purpose is to help plan, track, and report on the status of projects. but those purposes are supported by its more discrete features, which we'll be diving into during this course. An active board in JIRA allows you to easily update status and see the status of current work in progress. Backlog boards for scrum projects support planning upcoming work. Roadmaps in JIRA also help with this purpose. Visual charts in JIRA, which unfortunately JIRA calls reports, show status and provide data points that can help plan. For instance, for an Agile project, you can get a velocity chart that helps you see how much work your team tends to get done over a period of time. Dashboards in JIRA help show a variety of visual charts or gadgets that radiate status information about one or more projects at a glance. And issue filters help find issues in JIRA and report on them in a rows and columns format, a more traditional report. Issue filters that select issues in JIRA Jira also feed into other Jira features like Boards and Dashboard Gadgets. We'll explore all of these features during this course. But first, let's get hands-on with Jira at a high level and learn how to find our way around in both Jira Cloud and Jira Data Center.

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