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 these reasons, 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. By the end of this chapter, you will have learned the following:
- Issues and what they are in JIRA
- Creating, editing, and deleting issues
- Moving issues between projects
- Expressing your interest in issues through voting and watching
- Advanced issue operations, including uploading attachments and linking issues
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 on 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:
- An issue must belong to a project.
- It must have a type, otherwise known as an issue type, which indicates what the issue is representing.
- It must have a summary. The summary acts like a one-line description of what the issue is about.
- It must have a status. A status indicates where along the workflow the issue is at a given time. We will discuss workflows in Chapter 6, Workflows and Business Processes.