Projects are collections of issues, and issues are collections of fields. As we have seen in the earlier chapters, fields are what capture data that can be then displayed to users. There are many different types of fields in JIRA, ranging from simple text fields that let you input alphanumeric texts, to more complicated fields with pickers to assist you in choosing dates and users.
An information system is only as useful as the data that goes into it. By understanding how to effectively use fields, you can turn JIRA into a powerful information system for data collection, processing, and reporting.
In this chapter, we will expand our Help Desk project with these customized fields and configurations, by exploring fields in detail and learning how they relate to other aspects of JIRA. By the end of this chapter, you will have learned the following:
- Understanding built-in and custom fields
- Collecting custom data through custom fields
- Adding behaviors to fields with field configurations
- Understanding field configuration schemes and how to apply them to projects
JIRA comes with a number of built-in fields. You have already seen a few of them in the previous chapters. Fields such as summary, priority, and assignee are all built-in. They make up the backbone of an issue, and you cannot remove them from the system. For this reason, they are referred to as system fields. The following table lists the most important built-in fields in JIRA: