JIRA initially started off as a bug tracking system, helping software development teams to better track and manage the problems/issues in their projects. Over the years, JIRA has improved its features to add support for Scrum and Kanban through the JIRA Agile add-on. This enables projects to be managed through both the traditional waterfall model and newer agile methodologies.

In this chapter, we will start with a high-level view of the overall hierarchy on how data is structured in JIRA. We will then take a look at the various user interfaces that JIRA has for working with projects, both as an administrator and an everyday user. We will also introduce permissions for the first time in the context of projects and will expand on this in later chapters.

By the end of this chapter, you will learn the following: