In the previous chapter, you saw that JIRA is a very flexible and versatile tool that can be used in different organizations for different purposes. A software development organization will use JIRA to manage its software development lifecycle and bug tracking, while a customer services organization may choose to use JIRA to track and log customer complaints and suggestions. For this reason, issues in JIRA can represent anything that is applicable to the real-world scenario. Generally speaking, an issue in JIRA often represents a unit of work that can be acted upon by one or more people.
In this chapter, we will explore the basic and advanced features offered by JIRA for you to manage issues. We will also look at some of the changes that JIRA 5 brings, which will make it more efficient to work with issues. By the end of this chapter, you will have learned the following:
In JIRA, an issue can represent any number of things. In fact, an issue in a given project may mean something that is very different in another project. So what an issue really is depends upon the context of what project it is in, and how you choose to define and use JIRA. For example, an issue in a normal software development project would often represent a software bug, while in a help desk project it can represent a support request.
Despite all the different objects an issue can represent, there are a number of key aspects that are common for all issues in JIRA, as follows: