Now that we have seen all the key aspects that make up a project, let's revisit what we learned so far and put it to practice. In this exercise, we will be setting up a project for our support teams:
Let's start by creating a project category. We will create a category for all of our internal support teams and their respective support JIRA projects.
Please note that this step is optional as JIRA does not require any project to belong to a project category:
- Log in to JIRA with a user who has JIRA Administrator's permission.
- Browse to the JIRA administration console.
- Select the Projects tab and Project Categories.
- Fill in the fields as shown in the following screenshot.
- Click on Add to create the new project category.
Now that we have a project category created, let's create a project for our help desk support team. To create a new project, perform the following steps:
- Bring up the create project dialog by selecting the Create Project option from the Projects drop-down menu.
- Select the Simple Issue Tracking project template.
- Name our new project as
GlobalHelpDeskand accept the other default values for Key and Project Lead. - Click on the Submit button to create the new project.
You should now be taken to the Project Browser interface of your new project.
Having created the new project, you need to assign the new project to your project category, and you can do this from the Project Administration interface:
- Select the Administration tab.
- Click on the None link next to Category, on the top left of the page, right underneath the project's name.
- Select the new Support project category we just created.
- Click on Select to assign the project.
As discussed in the earlier sections, components are subsections of a project. This makes logical sense for a software development project, where each component will represent a software deliverable module. For other types of project, components may first appear useless or inappropriate.
It is true that components are not for every type of project out there, and this is the reason why you are not required to have them by default. Just like everything else in JIRA, all the features come from how you can best map them to your business needs.
The power of a component is more than just a flag field for an issue. For example, let's imagine that the company you are working for has a range of systems that need to be supported. These may range from phone systems and desktop computers to other business applications. Let's also assume that our support team needs to support all of the systems. Now, that is a lot of systems to support. To help manage and delegate support for these systems, we will create a component for each of the systems that the help desk team supports. We will also assign a lead for each of the components. This setup allows us to establish a structure where the Help Desk project is led by the support team lead, and each component is led by their respective system expert (who may or may not be the same as the team lead). As we will see in later chapters, this allows for a very flexible management process when we start wiring in other JIRA features, such as notification schemes:
Now that you have fully prepared your project, let's see how everything comes together by creating an issue. If everything is done correctly, you should see a dialog box similar to the next screenshot, where you can choose your new project to create the issue in and also the new components that are available for selection:
- Click on the Create button from the top navigation bar. This will bring up the Create Issue dialog box.
- Select Global Help Desk for Project.
- Select Task for Issue Type, and click on the Next button.
- Fill in the fields with some dummy data. Note that the Component/s field should display the components we just created.
- Click on the Create button to create the issue.
You can test out the default assignee feature by leaving the Assignee field as Automatic, select a component, and JIRA will automatically assign the issue to the default assignee defined for the component.
If everything goes well, the issue will be created in the new project.