JIRA Tutorial: A Complete Hands-on How-To-Use JIRA Guide

Atlassian JIRA Tutorial Series of 20+ Hands-on Tutorials:

What is JIRA?

Atlassian JIRA is an issue and project tracking software to plan, track and manage your projects. JIRA is mainly used by agile development teams to customize your workflows, team collaboration, and release software with confidence.

For your convenience we have listed all the JIRA tutorials in this series: 

JIRA Tutorial List

Tutorial #1:  Introduction to Atlassian JIRA Software
Tutorial #2:  JIRA Download, Installation, and License Setup
Tutorial #3:  How to Use JIRA as a Ticketing Tool
Tutorial #4:  How to Create Sub-Task with Example
Tutorial #5:  JIRA Workflows and Reports
Tutorial #6:  Administration and User Management
Tutorial #7:  JIRA Agile Tutorial
Tutorial #8:  Agile Project Portfolio Management Plug-in for JIRA
Tutorial #9:  Scrum Handling with JIRA
Tutorial #10:  JIRA Dashboard Tutorial
Tutorial #11:  Zephyr for JIRA Test Management
Tutorial #12:  Atlassian Confluence Tutorial
Tutorial #14:  Test Automation for JIRA with Katalon Studio
Tutorial #15:  Integrate JIRA With TestLodge
Tutorial #16:  Top 7 Most Popular JIRA Plugins
Tutorial #17:  7 Best JIRA Alternatives in 2018
Tutorial #18:  JIRA Interview questions
Tutorial #19: Jira Time Tracking: How To Use Jira Time Management Software?
Tutorial #20: Complete Guide To Tempo Timesheets: Installation & Configuration

Let’s start with the first tutorial in this Training Series!!

Introduction To JIRA Software

Before we get into what this tool is, how it can be used and who it is used by, I want to lay out some ground rules that will help us learn any tool easily and effectively in a short period of time.

I personally think that learning any tool has 2 phases to it:

• Understanding the underlying process
• Learning the tool itself- features/capabilities/shortcomings, etc.

Take the case of JIRA. Think that you are a newbie and know nothing about it. You have heard about it from various friends, online references, etc. You want to try your hand at it. How can you do that?

Ask yourself these questions:

• What kind of tool is it?
• Who uses it?

JIRA is an Incident Management tool. What is Incident Management? This is the stage when you forget all about the tool and work on the process.

Before we see more details about this tool, let’s get familiar with the incident management process.

Incident Management Process Overview

Any task that is to be completed can be considered an incident.

Top 10 Incident Management Requirements are:

1. An Incident has to be created
2. Additional information needs to be added to the Incident to make the description comprehensive
3. Each stage of its progress should be marked and moved along the steps until completion
4. The stages or steps that the Incident needs to go through should be defined
5. It might be linked to other Incidents or have some child incidents
6. Incidents might have to be grouped according to some common rules
7. Concerned people should be aware of the incident creation/change in the state
8. Others should be able to provide their feedback on certain defects
9. The Incident should be searchable
10. Reports have to available if we need to see any trends

Whether it is JIRA or any other incident management tool, they should be able to support these core 10 requirements and enhance them if possible, right?  In this series, we will look into how JIRA fares with respect to our list.

Download And Install

It is a Defect tracking/Project Management tool by Atlassian, Inc. It is a platform-independent software.

You can download and try it free for 30 days at this page: Download JIRA

Who Uses This Software?

Software project development teams, help desk systems, leave request systems, etc.

Coming to its applicability to QA teams, it is widely used for Bug tracking, Tracking project-level issues- like documentation completion and for tracking environmental issues. Working knowledge of this tool is highly desirable across the industry.

Basics Of JIRA Tool

JIRA in its entirety is based on 3 concepts.

• Issue: Every task, bug, enhancement request; basically anything to be created and tracked is considered an Issue.
• Project: A collection of issues
• Workflow: A workflow is simply the series of steps an issue goes through starting from creation to completion.

Say the issue first gets created, goes to being worked on and when complete gets closed. The workflow in this case is:

Let us get hands-on.

Once you create a trial, an OnDemand account gets created for you and you will be able to login to it.

Once logged in, the Dashboard page is displayed (unless otherwise chosen) to the user. The Dashboard page gives a snapshot of the description of the project you belong to; issue summary and the activity stream (the issues that are assigned to you, the issues that you created, etc).

You can do that by going to the main menu and choosing the Project name from the “Projects” dropdown.

We defined earlier that a project is a collection of issues. Item number 6 in our list – the feature that enables the grouping of the issues is fulfilled with this concept. Projects have components and versions under it. Components are nothing but subgroups within a project based on common grounds. Also, for the same project, different versions can be tracked.

Every project has the following main attributes:

• Name: as selected by the administrator.
• Key: It is an identifier that all the issue names under the project are going to start with. This value is set during the creation of a project and cannot be modified later even by an administrator.
• Components
• Versions

For instance, take a web-based application; there are 10 requirements that need to be developed. There will be 5 more features added to it later on. You can choose to create the project as “Test for STH” version 1 and Version 2.  Version1 with 10 requirements, version 2 with 5 new ones.

For version 1 if 5 of the requirements belong to Module 1 and the rest of them belong to module 2. The module 1 and module 2 can be created as separate units

Note: Project creation and management in JIRA is an admin task. So we are not going to cover project creation and will continue the discussion using an already created project.

Taking the details in the above example, I have created a project in JIRA called “Test for STH”, the key is “TFS”. So, if I create a new issue, the issue identifier will start with TFS and will be “TSH-01”. We will see this aspect in the next session when we create issues.

How the Project details are displayed:

Please note the left-hand side navigation.

When I choose the “Components” option, it displays the two components within the project:

When I choose the versions option, the versions within the project are displayed

Choose Roadmap option, the version information is displayed along with dates giving a general idea about the important milestones in the project.

Choose the calendar option to view the milestones date wise:

At this point, there are no issues created for this project. If there were, you will be able to see all of them by choosing “Issues” from the left navigation menu.

In the next session, we will learn how to download and install JIRA and all about working with JIRA issues. Please feel free to post your questions and comments below.

NEXT Tutorial