Hands-On Agile Software Development with JIRA: Design and manage software projects using the Agile methodology

JIRA has been in place for a while, and it originally as an issue ticketing system, with a bug tracking kind of software, but, as project management has evolved over the years, Agile processes have become increasingly popular. JIRA has become a very effective Agile management tool for both Scrum and for common, and is now primarily used in that way.

JIRA has three different packages that it offers at this time:

These packages include the base software of JIRA Core and also include Agile project management features.

JIRA has been used extensively and it has a huge community with lots of add-ons, which allow for planning, tracking, releasing, and reporting. Here's a link we can use to learn more about JIRA: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira.

Here are the following steps to view projects in JIRA:

Project view

JIRA uses projects to help us organize our work and create a holding place for everything. It uses a key, which is a three or four digit ID, which we can reference as well.

We'll go more into detail about what all of these different things are in the UI, but for now, it's important to note that projects are what JIRA uses in order to organize our work. 

First, let's take a look at workflows so that we can understand how workflows operate. We'll go into more detail in the next section about workflows, but what we really need to understand is that this will control the way that the issues move from To Do, to In Progress, to Done, and this allows us to customize the way that it works:

If we take a look at screenshots for this project, we can see that we're using a Scrum issue type, so this will allow us to select the items that appear on those different issue types, which are things such as story points, assignee, and acceptance criteria:

We will now look into the Fields. This allows us to control the fields that are available:

We can do things like setting up and creating components.

And we can even set notifications as follows:

We can see that when an issue is created, we're going to notify all watchers, the current assignee, and the reporter when the issues are updated, and more besides. We can also customize this. If you're one of those people who receives way too many emails already, you might want to slim this down a little bit so that we're really only being notified about the most important actions. We know now how to create and manage our projects in JIRA.

We are going to flip over to the JIRA account and look at our project view:

Or, we could even just type components and add it back that way, and we'll drag it back up to the right before the description where we had it before. That's how we use screens in JIRA. Next, let's take a look at workflows.

From the options on the left-hand side, click on Workflows. 

What the workflow is going to let us do is allow us to see the different ways that a status can affect another status, and how items can move from one status to the next so that we can see how this works:

This will take us to the following screen:

Then, we can allow different transitions to happen to this closed status. One example that we might want to do would be, let's say, if we have story points assigned to an item, or perhaps hours assigned to an item. When we move that through the workflow, and that item goes from IN PROGRESS to DONE, when we move it to CLOSED, we may want to have the remaining hours update itself to zero. This is an example of something that we might want to do with that workflow. 

 We want to take a look at permissions, so we'll bring up the Permissions options for our default software scheme, which is what we're using for our Scrum project, as can be seen in the following screenshot:

Project Permissions

Since we're the only one that's actually accessing and controlling this, we have access to everything, but if we had more people that were assigned to this project, then we would be able to identify who can do what, both from a project permissions perspective as well as from an issue permissions perspective. 

We can see that we have a Notifications option under our First Project. We learned a little bit about this in the last section, but we will learn more about it now:

But let's say we were the person who reported an issue, and, when that issue was created, we would want the current assignee, the person that's assigned to that issue, to be notified, and we'd also want any of the watchers of that item to be notified as well. We, as the reporter, would be notified. But then let's say that that issue goes ahead and gets updated. Once that issue gets updated, it may be that we don't want to be notified of that. Therefore, we can edit the notifications.

Click on Delete under the Issue Updated section. This will take us to the following screen:

The reporter will now be notified when an item is created but not when it's updated. The reporter is again notified when the item is assigned.