Book Image

Jira Software Essentials - Second Edition

By : Patrick Li
Book Image

Jira Software Essentials - Second Edition

By: Patrick Li

Overview of this book

Jira Software is an agile project management tool that supports any agile methodology, be it scrum, Kanban, or your own unique flavour. From agile boards to reports, you can plan, track, and manage all your agile software development projects from a single tool. Jira Software brings the power of agile methodology to Atlassian Jira. This second edition of JIRA Agile Essentials, will help you dive straight into the action, exploring critical agile terminologies and concepts in the context of Jira Software. You will learn how to plan, track, and release great software. This book will teach you how to install and run Jira Software and set it up to run with Scrum and Kanban. It will also teach you to use Jira Software your way and run projects beyond the out-of-box Scrum and Kanban way, including a hybrid approach of both the methodologies and other options that come with Jira Software. Later, you will learn how to integrate it with the tools you are already using and enhance Jira with add-ons such as Confluence. You will learn to stay connected with your team from anywhere to ensure great development. Jira Software has numerous deployment options in the cloud, on your own infrastructure, or at a massive scale. You will be introduced to Bitbucket, Atlassian’s distributed version control system, which integrates seamlessly with Jira, allowing your team to work within the two applications as one harmonious environment. With this practical guide, you will develop a great working knowledge of Jira Software and your project management will become much more efficient.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Working with columns


Columns represent the statuses that an issue can be in. On a simple board, as shown in the following screenshot, we have three columns, and they are each mapped to an issue status:

  • To Do: Issues that are waiting in the queue to be worked on are mapped to the To Do workflow status
  • In Progress: Issues that are currently being worked on are mapped to the In Progress workflow status
  • Done: Issues that are completed are mapped to the Done workflow status:

This is a very simple setup where issues only have three steps from start to finish. Often, you will have an existing workflow that is more complex than this.

Jira and workflow

Before we get into customizing columns, we first need to take a quick look at workflows in relation to Jira. As you may already know, Jira uses workflows to move an issue from one status to the next. Jira also leverages this feature by mapping its columns to workflow statuses. However, if you are not familiar with how workflow works in Jira, do not worry...