Conversely, in agile software development, Jira has been famed for facilitating high-quality code and faster release cycles. Notwithstanding, if your team is not purely Agile, it can be challenging to trim JIRA for to your needs. Initially, focusing on automating processes, tasks, issues, and defects. Jira components can be adapted to so many industries besides software. Ordinarily, keeping track of who, where, what, why of any process!
Main Jira Components
Jira has four recognized components which can be summarized as:
- JIRA Core – common amongst all business teams. It’s basically a scaled down version of Jira Software containing general project management capabilities. Furthermore, without the software and agile-specific functionality of Jira Software. Above all, it’s focused on organizing tasks for teams thus more useful for businesses.
- JIRA Software – popular for software teams. Especially since it adopts the scrum agile methodology of project management.
- JIRA Service Desk – designed to facilitate desk teams in Helpdesk, Support and Customer Services. Specifically, this can be by creating tickets and tracking the resolution and status of the created tickets. It’s a totally separate application for mainly customer service capabilities.
- Portfolio for Jira Portfolio- separate add-on that enables portfolio management in Jira Software.
Why use Jira?
Generally, the Jira world is fully comprehensive as you buy add-ons from the JIRA marketplace for any extras. Though its noteworthy to know that they’re not supported by Atlassian. Additionally, JIRA provides free license for academic projects. Furthermore, its workflow and process management is world renown with its ability to automate team processes into workflows. It has brilliant task tracking and requirement management, change request tracking and request assistance. Not forgetting that JIRA is an incident management tool, simply the everything tool!
Features of Jira Components.
Generally, Jira is known for planning in small smart doses with better visibilities to solve problems. Basically, prioritization at another level for less downtime between tasks. Thus unmatched collaboration as you create realistic tasks! This is the guiding principle of all Jira Components. Conversely, we wouldn’t do any justice to Jira if we highlighted common features across its multiple components. Or may be credited the stand out features to give a deeper overview.
Project
A project is a group or container of issues in Jira. Similarly, anything can be an issue. Basically, if you have a process to track something, that something is an ‘issue’. Additionally, sub-tasks are children of issues, more like a parent-child relationship. We use projects to organize and optimize our teams, whether software devs, sales team, marketing team, and more.
Issues
Specifically, we mentioned an issue can be anything. In JIRA issues can be anything that can be tracked like bugs, task, or requests. JIRA allows prioritization, assigning, tracking, reporting and auditing of ‘issues’. That can be software bugs, hardware defects, to improvement and change requests.
Story Points.
Story points are an agile concept. This is a common denominator amongst Jira Components. It is a way to estimate time between tasks or basic project timelines. Look at it this way, Jira uses the concept of story points and not hours.
Sprints
Batches of work or tasks that people do are called sprints. Most favorable sprints shouldn’t take beyond 2 weeks. See it this way, a task is anything that takes more than 30 minutes to do but less than 3 days. The dev team normally chooses a number of user stories to which it can commit to for the sprint. User stories can still be added during the sprint. Though the team needs to commit to a certain number of items.
Tickets
These ideally help you create realistic tasks. With tickets, keep in mind the recommended granularity of work that is represented by this ticket. For example, the average ticket size should be between 2 hours and 2 days. Consequently, with a development task it could be a bigger ticket, but shouldn’t be longer than 2 weeks. Furthermore, all tickets have a life cycle or workflow.
Workflows
Accordingly, a workflow here is the status and transitions that define how your issues process within your Jira project. Furthermore, you can customize your own workflows to fit your workstyle. Jira components allow the project workflow to be customized in a graphical way. Specifically, by simply adding or removing issue statuses on the workflow diagram. Further, by switching the workflow from one status to another. As a project grows, more workflows can be added to the project. This agile feature gives Jira components a very high extensibility to achieve goals.
Boards
To enumerate, boards provide an immediate snapshot of the project to the team. Jira additionally supports Scrum and Kanban boards. They facilitate the quick review of the progress of the project and the status of the individual tasks. Generally, Jira components with different board workflows can be customized to fulfill the way a team wants to proceed. Team members can manage issues by doing a drag and drop right on the board.
Filters
Specifically,Jira allows you to search tickets using various criteria. Search parameters can be saved as filters. You can create your own filters to track your progress or progress of your teammates. Filters can also be used to generate reports.
Reporting components
Generally, all Jira components pride themselves in reporting, to allow us monitoring the progress of issues with detailed graphs and charts. Reports make the progress of the project much more easy to visualize and help with management of personnel. Additionally, they help with future estimation and planning. Jira Reports classified into three categories: agile reports which satisfy the fundamental requirement of agile management. Additionally, issue analysis reports which provide statistical information about the properties of issues. Further, forecast and management reports providing time-tracking and workload information for management adjustment.
Plugins
Generally, the Jira plug‐in network allow customization and extend JIRA to suit our needs. Further, allowing addition of new features to suit particular project requirements. The most popular plug‐ins created are by the JIRA developer community and third‐parties. For example, there are add-ons that allow you to generate trace matrices. Though it’s not a built-in feature that comes with JIRA. Additionally, plugins and applications are all easy to install and remove.