From the course: Learning Jira Software

Important definitions - Jira Tutorial

From the course: Learning Jira Software

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Important definitions

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- [Instructor] Before we get started, I wanted to refresh your memory of some important terms. An issue is an individual item in Jira. Each time you create an item, you're creating a new issue with the unique key to identify it. An issue can be any individual record in the database, like a request, a problem, a task, a to-do item or a development team item, like a story, bug or epic. Now, a project is a collection of issues. The word project in Jira is different than an initiative your team is working on outside of Jira. You can think of a Jira project as a container for all your team's initiatives, tasks and to-do items. There's generally one Jira project per department, system, team or application. So for example, there might be a project called Development to track new features, bug fixes and maintenance work. An issue type is a classification of issues in a Jira project, like an epic, a story or a bug. Each Jira project has its own set of issues types based on the type of work done. Each project has a long name and a short name. In the example, the project's long name is Development and its short name is DEV. You can use these names interchangeably when searching for Jira issues. Each issue in a Jira project has a unique identifier or key. It's made up of the project short name and a unique number. So in this example, the key is DEV-1. And here's a tip, any time you're discussing an issue in chat, email, or in a meeting, always provide the issue key. This will eliminate confusion between similar issues. Here's some additional terms that we'll use later in the course. A board is a status-based view of issues for one or more projects. It's an easy way to see the status of many issues at the same time. In this example, there's one issue in the to-do column. When work is ready to start, simply drag the issue to the in progress column in this view or go to the issue to transition it to another step in the workflow. A dashboard is a statistics-based view of issues from one or more projects. A dashboard shows a lot of issue data at one time. Dashboards show counts, trends and charts. There's a default system dashboard for everyone to use and you can create your own custom dashboards too. We'll create boards and dashboards later in the course. Finally, a query is a question you ask Jira and JQL is the language you use to ask. JQL means Jira Query Language and it's the way to search through thousands of issues to find the few that you're looking for. If you're familiar with SQL, you'll pick this up very quickly. In this example, the query asks how many bugs the marketing team reported this week. Any issues meeting that criteria are shown below. You can save a JQL query as a filter to use again later or control which issues appear on a board, dashboard or report. You can also receive query results via email at a scheduled frequency. I'll show you some examples and ways to use these features later in the course.

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