How to use Jira

How to use Jira? If you are asking yourself this question and wondering if Jira can be used in the work of your team, then in this article you will find the answer to this question. You will read what are the components of the Atlassian ecosystem and how to use Jira in a team to take work to a new level. I invite you to read.

How to start using Jira?

In the beginning, it is worth realizing that Jira is just one of the elements of the system offered by Atlassian. Within the whole package, integral elements are Jira, Confluence, Trello, and Atlas. In this article, I would like to show you how to use Jira in combination with other elements of the system in order to fully use the potential of this tool.

Let’s start with how to use Jira. Jira is primarily a task management tool. In its simplest version, it allows you to create tasks and assign them to people responsible for implementation. Well, such task management, can be done even in a simple spreadsheet, what more does Jira give?

Jira gives you the opportunity to arrange tasks in a process. Depending on what industry you work in and what tasks you deal with, you know perfectly well what path each task must go through. In Jira, you have the option to recreate this path in an automated way. Starting with the fact that each task will have a template prepared by you with appropriate fields to fill in, and ending with the fact that each subsequent stage of the task can be automated so that subsequent people receive this task to perform and are notified that a new task is waiting for them using the selected communication tool.

However, before you can create tasks, you need to create a project in Jira. You can create a project from scratch or use one of the available project templates. As you can see, in the picture below, the choice of ready-made templates is huge. It is worth starting the adventure with Jira by choosing one of the ready-made templates.

In this case, we will select “Work management” and “Task tracking”

The system will ask us to name the project, let’s say we want to build a park in the city: “Green City Park Development”. As you can see, Jira is not only suitable for project management in IT. Today, you can use Jira’s capabilities in any industry and in any type of business. With wide access to templates, you can easily see if Jira is for you.

After creating a project, you can easily add more tasks to complete. Basically, the tasks will appear on the kanban board, which can be easily configured by adding additional columns, which are by default the next stages of task implementation.

If we add the dates of planned implementation, responsible persons, and the date by which the tasks are to be completed, we will be able to use the calendar view and even the TimeLine in Jira.

The task board view also allows us to filter tasks, for example by labels or assigned people. With a large number of tasks, such task filtering is very useful.

Connect to Confluence

In the context of the question of How to use Jira, the second question usually arises: Where to store the project documentation? A great place to store project documentation is Confluence. It allows you to collect all documentation in one place, and each task from Jira can be associated with a specific space in Confluence. Thanks to this solution, longer job descriptions in Jira are not necessary. In Jira, you can create a task with a password title, and if the task description is long, you can add a link to a page in Confluence where there is a complete job description.

How to add tasks in Jira

Tasks in Jira can be added by clicking add task. It’s the easiest way and great for adding individual tasks. However, at the beginning of the project we usually have a long list of tasks to carry out, and adding them in this way is not the most convenient form of adding tasks.

It is much more convenient to add tasks directly from Confluence or from a CSV file.

If we have created project documentation in Confluence in the form of a table of requirements, we can use a ready-made macro that will transfer the requirements from Confluence to Jira. It is enough to prepare the table in the right way, i.e. so that it has a task title and a description of the task. You can also add additional columns, such as label, epic, and assigned person.

The same applies to importing tasks into Jira using a CSV file. Similarly, as I wrote above, we prepare columns containing such elements as task title, task description, and, for example, the date of completion, and then we use the Jira importer, which will allow us to easily generate all the tasks we set at the beginning of the project.

How to use Jira during the project?

When the project is in progress, the statuses of individual tasks can be viewed on collective boards, which have a very wide range of filtering tasks and configuration of views, which is very useful, especially for large projects. Tasks can be combined with each other if they remain in relationships. Can be grouped into epics, or labeled.

What’s more, we can assign an estimated time of completion to each task and then track the actual time of the task. This will allow us to estimate during the project whether we are still on schedule and, more importantly, when we will finish the project.

Summary

I hope I was able to convey in this article that using Jira is very simple. At the beginning, just choose the industry in which you operate and what type of task management you are interested in, and then choose one of the ready-made project templates to start working with Jira.

In the beginning, you do not have to wonder how to configure it all, because the templates are prepared so that the start is easy and intuitive. Of course, in the next steps you may want to delve into the possibilities of Jira and configure the project more for your own needs, which I heartily encourage. At the beginning, you can look at another of my Jira articles, How to start?, where I describe in detail how to work with Jira.

If you’re interested in juxtaposing Jira with another project management tool, feel free to do so here: Jira vs. Monday.com