JIRA OverView

What is JIRA?

JIRA is a project management tool used for issues and bugs tracking system for all types of testing.The JIRA dashboard consists of many useful functions and features which make handling of issues easy.
The following points explain some interesting details of JIRA.
• JIRA is an incident management tool.
• JIRA is not an acronym, the name 'JIRA' comes from the Japanese word 'Gojira'
• JIRA is developed by Australian Company Atlassian
• 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 can be integrated with many other tools like GitHub, Team Foundation Software and many more.
• JIRA is a commercial tool and available as a Trial version for a limited time.
• To utilize JIRA services, a license is required.
Features:
JIRA is one the best product management tool which includes:
Issue tracking & management: A software application that allows to record and follow the progress of every problem or "issue" that user identifies until the problem is resolved.
Product Management:Where we can create project, create sprints inside those projects, manage it by creating stories which team would work on to deliver the product.
Configurable dashboard with widgets: Which allows us to track what is going on in project, can track user work-flows, burndown charts, verify velocity of team etc.
Reporting: Gives best reports to understand the progress of the project. Helps us with total spent verses the estimation, which us to understand the budget very preciously
Scrum & Kanban: Helps us with configurable scrum and Kanban boards. Where we can use Scrum board for managing our board, which we can use Kanban to manage bugs, epics in the system.
Plugins Support: Jira supports a tons of external plugins which can be used to manage everything regarding our product inside Jira. Like GitHub ,TFS
Key Benefits of  JIRA :
Better visibility: One of the primary problems that slows any project down, is a lack of clear and open visibility as to what tasks need to be done and when.
Better prioritization: Another benefit of using JIRA is that it allows you to prioritise tasks better and for all members of the team to see which tasks need to be completed right away and which can be dealt with later.
Increased productivity: When using JIRA, members of a team are always able to see exactly which task is next up on the list for completion.
Anywhere & Anytime: A further benefit of the JIRA software is that it comes with widely available mobile apps. This means that all team members can stay connected not just when in the office or on their laptop, but also via their mobiles and tablets too.
What is JIRA Issue?
JIRA issue would track bug or issue that underlies the project. Once we have imported project then we can create issues.   
Under Issues, we will find other useful features like
• Issue Types
• Workflow's
• Issue Attributes
Issue types
There are several types of Issues to identify the work and categorize the similar issues.
An Issue is classified as follows :
• Epic: Epic is a big capture of a large body of a work that needs to be broken down. There can be several epics in a project.It may take several sprints to complete an epic .
• Story :The term "story" comes from "User Story". A user story deliveres value to the customer/user. It's a product requirement from the customer/user.  The stories are the actual items for getting things done.
• Task :A task that needs to be done to achieve team’s goal. A task is not written in the user story format. A task has more a technical nature.
• Sub-Task :A subtask is  the child of a task. a sub-task is for breaking up a task  into pieces that can be tackled separately.  The best reasons for doing that are that there are distinct pieces we want to track separately.Basically Sub-tasks is used as a tool to organize  own work. This will help to better structure a bigger task.
Let's say a team member is working on a task and gets sick the day after he started. It will be easier for a person who continues this story to find out where he left off when having sub-tasks on it.We can also use sub-tasks to assign out work to other group members  when we need their help in order to call your task/story done..

• Bug : A problem that impairs or prevents the functions of the product.

• Improvement : An improvement or enhancement to an existing feature or task.
• New Feature : A new feature of the product, which is yet to be developed.

An example of these distinctions could be:

Lets say we need to implement a feature that will authenticate a user before she logs into our website.This idea of user authentication is an epic where we don’t know the details functionality.We only have the abstract idea.

• Epic: 

        User Authentication.

• User Stories:

1.User Login screen

        2.Forgot Password workflow.

        3.Lock account after too many failed attempts.

        4.Google login support.

        5.Facebook login support.

• Tasks:

1.Develop login page

        2.Design overall system architecture 

        3.Research and decide on unit test and mocking framework.

 • Sub-Tasks:

1.Implement login page HTML/CSS/JS.

         2.Create SQL scripts to create tables.

         3.Create SQL scripts for stored procedures.

         4.Create web service REST API for user resource.

         5.Hook up login page to web service REST API.

Issue Attributes

Issue Attributes encompasses

• Statuses

• Resolutions

• Priorities

Statuses: Different statuses are used to indicate the progress of a project like To do, InProgress, Open, Closed, ReOpened, and Resolved. 

Resolutions: In resolution it also tells about the progress of issue like Fixed, Won't fix, Duplicate, Incomplete, Cannot reproduce, Done.

Priorities: the priorities of the issue whether an issue is critical, major, minor, blocker and Trivial.

WorkFlows

JIRA workflow encompasses five main stages once the issue is created.

• Open Issue

• Resolved Issue

• InProgress Issue

• ReOpened Issue

• Close Issue

Create and work with issues:                                                                                     
An issue is the most basic entity in Jira Core. Depending on team and its needs, issues  can represent different things. Let's create an issue        
1.Click the create button in the dashboard

2.Fill out the fields using the data is shown below (Only the fields with * are mandatory):                                                                                                               Project
·Issue Type
·Summary
·Description 
Leave all other fields blank or at their default values.Click Create.

Edit an issue 

We can edit our issue to add more information, attach new files or screenshots, and add metadata like labels. Inline editing is the quickest way to edit an issue. To access all issue fields, including blank fields that don't appear when inline editing, you can use the Edit issue dialog.

1.In our project, we need to select Issues from the project sidebar and open the issue we want to edit

2.Click on edit button

4.Change the fields we want to edit.

5.Then click the update button

The issue is updated immediately