As seen earlier, issues in JIRA can represent many things ranging from software development tasks to project management milestones. Issue type is what differentiates one kind of issue from another.
Each issue has a type (therefore, the name issue type), which is represented by the issue type field. This lets you know what type of issue it is and also helps you determine many other aspects of it, such as which fields will be displayed for this issue.
The default issue types are great for simple software development projects, but they do not necessarily meet the needs of others. Since it is impossible to create a system that can address everyone's needs, JIRA lets you create your own issue types and assigns them to projects. For example, for a help desk project, you might want to create a custom issue type called ticket. You can create this custom issue type and assign it to the Help Desk project and users will be able to log tickets, instead of bugs, in the system.
Issue types are managed through the Manage Issue Types page. Perform the following steps to access this page:
- Log in to JIRA as a JIRA administrator.
- Browse to the JIRA administration console.
- Select the Issues tab and then the Issue types option. This will take you to the Issue Types Administration page.
The following screenshot shows a list of default issue types that come with JIRA Software. If you only have JIRA Core, the list may look different:
You can create any number of issue types. Perform the following steps to create a new issue type:
- Browse to the Issue Types Administration page.
- Click on the Add Issue Type button.
- Enter the name and description for the new issue type.
- Select whether the new issue type will be a standard issue type or a subtask issue type.
- Click on Add to create the new issue type.
Once the new issue type is created, it will be assigned a default icon. If you want to change the icon, you will need to click on the Edit link for the issue type and then select a new image as its icon.
When deleting an issue type, you have to keep in mind that the issue type might already be in use, meaning that there are issues created with that issue type. So, when you delete an issue type, you will need to select a new one for those issues. The good news is that JIRA takes care of this for you. As shown in the following screenshot, we delete the Bug issue type and JIRA informs us of the already existing 6 issues of type Bug. You will need to assign them to a new issue type, such as Improvement:
