JIRA initially started off as a bug-tracking system, helping software development teams to better track and manage the problems/issues in their projects. Over the years, JIRA has expanded on the concept and capabilities of projects by adding support for agile and later letting you run projects as a public facing service desk, each with its own features and user interface. With all these new additions, it became a bit confusing, especially to newcomers. So starting with JIRA 7, Atlassian has made improvements to help streamline how a project is used and help users to get started quickly.
In this chapter, we will focus on the most basic project type, the business project, which is available to all three JIRA applications, Core, Software, and Service Desk. We will then take a look at the various user interfaces that JIRA has for working with projects, both as an administrator and an everyday user. We will also introduce permissions for the first time in the context of projects and will expand on this in later chapters. Business project being the basic project type, most concepts covered in this chapter will be applicable to the more specialized types.
By the end of this chapter, you will learn the following:
- JIRA project types and templates
- Different user interfaces for project management in JIRA
- How to create new projects in JIRA
- How to import data from other systems into JIRA
- How to manage and configure a project
- How to manage components and versions
Starting with JIRA 7, a new concept called project type is introduced. Project types define the features available for your projects as well as the user interface that will be used to present information within the projects. Each project type also comes with one or more templates, with a set of predefined configurations to help you get started quickly. The following screenshot shows you the project types and their templates from an out-of-the-box JIRA Software installation.
If you create a project using the Scrum software development template under the Software project type, your project will come with a scrum board and a set of configurations designed to work with the scrum methodology. On the other hand, if you choose the Task management template under the Business project type, your project will have a different user interface designed for task management.
As we have already seen, JIRA comes with a number of project types, depending on what applications you have installed. The business project type, being part of JIRA Core, is available to all installations.
Business projects are very similar to how JIRA worked before JIRA 7, where it worked as a highly customizable, generic task-tracking system. The focus of the business project type and its templates is on enabling users to easily create tasks and track and report their progress.
Out-of-the-box, you have three built-in templates, each with a set of predefined configurations such as workflows and fields, to give you some idea of how to set up your projects. You can use them as-is or customize them further, based on your needs.