We have seen the Project Administration interface, which is designed for project administrators. For most users, Project Browser is the interface they will be using with JIRA. Project Browser acts like the home page of a project, providing much useful information, such as issue statistics, recent user activities, and source control information.
To access the Project Browser interface, you first need to make sure that you have the Browse Project permission, and then select the project you wish to browse. The easiest way to select your project is to find your project from the projects listing.
Remember at the start of the chapter, we said that project category helps you to organize and group similar projects together? Well, here is the first example where you will see how project category may be useful.
First, we will go to the projects listing where JIRA will list all the projects we have; make sure you do not do this from the JIRA Administration interface. If in doubt, check if there is an ExistAdministration link at the top-right corner. If you see that, then you are in JIRA Administration and you need to click on the link to exit. Now, perform the following steps to bring up the projects list:
- Bring down the Projects menu from the top navigation bar.
- Click on View All Projects in the menu. This will take you to the projects listing:
If you have set up project categories and assigned projects to them, JIRA will display your list of projects in their own categories. In our example, the projects Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile are in the Mobile category. So, when the category is selected, only those three projects will be displayed. This can be useful when you have a lot of projects and it can be difficult when you have to sort through the large list.
From the project listing, if you click on the project's name, you will be taken to the Browse Project interface:
Just like the Project Administration interface, the Project Browser is made up of several tabs:
|
The Browser tab |
Description |
|---|---|
|
Displays a quick overview of the project. You can also access predefined reports and search filters directly here. | |
|
Displays a breakdown of issues in the project grouped by attributes, such as priority and status. | |
|
Displays all the unreleased versions for the project. | |
|
Displays all the released versions for the project. | |
|
Displays a list of unresolved issues, ordered by popularity (votes). | |
|
Displays the summary of unreleased versions of the project. This tab is only available when versions are configured. | |
|
Displays the summary of components and their related issues. This tab is only available when components are configured for the project. | |
|
Displays all the available labels in the project. Labels can be assigned to issues as tags. | |
|
Displays change sets from Atlassian FishEye and Stash | |
|
Displays code reviews from Atlassian Crucible. |
The Summary tab provides you with a single page view into the project you are working with. It provides you with a quick glance of the project with key information, including the following:
- Project description
- Unresolved issues that are due to be completed
- Unreleased versions due to be released
- Recently-updated issues
- Recent activities performed on the issues in this project
- Summary graph showing issue created versus issue resolved
- The Summary tab is also where you will be able to generate project reports and run search filters. Both, reports and filters are covered in Chapter 9, Searching, Reporting, and Analysis.
The Issues tab provides users with a nice breakdown of issues within the project. Issues are broken down and grouped by several key factors, such as priority and assignee, giving users a quick overview of the project's state. For example, Unresolved: By Assignee lets you know how many open issues are being assigned to each user, allowing the project team to better plan their resource allocation:
The Road map tab breaks down issues based on the versions they belong to. If you have set up versions in JIRA, then this tab will show you the upcoming unreleased versions and issues that need to be completed before the version can be completed.
Similar to the Roadmap tab, the Change Log tab breaks down issues based on versions. The difference is that the Change Log tab shows the versions that have already been released. This is very useful when you have to go back and check what has been achieved and completed for each of the past versions, providing you with a lot of changes.
The Versions and Components tabs list all the available versions and components that have been configured for this project respectively. If the user is also the project administrator, then there will be links for the user to add new versions and components respectively.
The Source and Reviews tabs require you to have the Altassian FishEye, Stash, and Crucible applications to be installed. Once installed, the tabs will pull in data from the applications and display them. If you do not have the required applications installed and configured, the tabs will prompt you to install the applications. FishEye and Stash are great tools to manage your code repositories, from browsing code contents to reviewing commits and changes. Stash is specially designed to support DVCS repositories, such as Git. Crucible is another application from Atlassian that allows your developers to collaborate with code reviews. Installing and configuring FishEye, Stash and Crucible are beyond the scope of this book.