Beginner’s Guide to Jira - A tool that

empowers Dev and Ops teams to

collaborate at high-velocity

Mestrado em Engenharia de Software

João Pedro Ramalho Monteiro

Professora:
Patrı́cia Macedo
Unidade Curricular:
Qualidade de Software
2022/2023
João Pedro Ramalho Monteiro Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal

Epigraph
“Simply using Jira doesn’t mean
you’re agile. Investing in the
digital infrastructure that
supports productivity and
collaboration allows companies
to hire in more places and take
serious advantage of talent.”

Claire Drumond, Atlassian

Head of Product Marketing, Jira
Software and Agile

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João Pedro Ramalho Monteiro Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal

Objective
Project management helps teams organize and prioritize tasks to better
achieve business goals. To handle the complex processes involved in projects
like developing an app or onboarding a new employee, companies need a
modern project management platform. Jira is one of the most well-known,
powerful, and feature-rich project management applications on the market.
It is simple to set up and accessible both on-premises and in the cloud. Ad-
ditionally, a large range of plugins are available that can be substantially
customized and improved to match the needs of development, tracking, bud-
get management, and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) projects.
Project management is a practice that involves planning, executing, and
monitoring all of the processes and tasks required to reach a set business goal.
While all three versions of Jira — Core, Software, and Service Desk — are
robust project management tools, Jira Software is required to take advantage
of Jira’s agile capabilities, like Scrum and Kanban boards. Jira was originally
developed by Atlassian to meet the needs of software development teams, but
it is now well-equipped to handle almost any project management use case.
Here are a few examples of how you can jump start project management in
your organization using Jira:

• Create/Customize workflows to deliver results: Every project

depends on workflows that will keep teams on schedule and produce the
expected outcome, and Jira’s workflow-related features are among its
most valuable for project management. Administrators can customize
the steps and resolutions of workflows and have a high level of control
over how and when workflows transition from one step to the next one.

• Discover valuable insights: To effectively manage ongoing projects,

you need to be able to track the personnel and resources allocated
to each and assess where work stands at a glance. Jira’s reporting
and visualization features give you a real-time perspective on team
performance, which makes it easier to meet deadlines, adjust workloads,
and improve efficiency.

• Practice agile project management: Jira Software’s agile capa-

bilities are a great boon for project management. An agile approach
emphasizes quick responses to change, effective collaboration, and the
successful completion of projects over painstaking documentation. Jira

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João Pedro Ramalho Monteiro Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal

Software users can choose either Scrum, an agile framework focused on

simplicity and self-organization, or Kanban, which is centered around
the use of Kanban boards that allow anyone to quickly organize and
track tasks.

• Improve alignment and collaboration among team members:

It’s easy to lose track of projects as they move from one team member
— or department — to another, or for processes that are codependent
to stall due to a lack of coordination. Your team members can use Jira
to both monitor their own assigned issues for each project and to see
how others are progressing. They can also leave comments on issues
and tag other users in them to facilitate frequent collaboration.

With all of this in mind, it’s time to work and get to know Jira.

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João Pedro Ramalho Monteiro Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal

Tutorial
I anticipate that by the end of this lesson, the reader will be able to create
an account, open their first workspace, share their workspace with a friend,
and perform some simple configurations in order to better grasp Jira’s agility.
We’ll make a few tasks, set up our Kanban board, comprehend how permis-
sions work, and learn how numerous assets can be customised.

• First step (Setup): Team up with a colleague and head in to the

Jira platform (Figure 1).

Figure 1: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira

Create an account and choose your site name. A ”tell us a bit about
yourself” window should appear, and select whatever options you want
(Note: You should select software management related answers). Type
in your team’s name, and leave template and type configurations on the
recommended ones (Kanban and Team-managed respectively). Lastly,
invite your colleague to the created project.

• Second step (First configurations): After the first step is con-

cluded, you should get to the main page of your newly created project
(Figure 2).

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João Pedro Ramalho Monteiro Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal

Figure 2: Jira’s project main page.

Let’s start by creating our first epic, and defining its dates. On the
left side navigation menu, select the first option available to go to the
Roadmap page (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Jira’s project roadmap.

Create an epic and name it ”Software Quality Tutorial”. By clicking

on the date board, you can configure its start and end date. Once the
epic is created, you can click on it and open the hyperlink to go to its
technical page (Figure 4).

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João Pedro Ramalho Monteiro Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal

Figure 4: Jira’s epic technical page.

In this page is where we will create tasks that’ll be allocated to this

epic. But first, let’s configure some important settings in order to be
able to get the most out of the tasks we’ll create. Head to project
definitions (Last option on the left side navigation menu) and select
the 5th option (types of problems). In this page (Figure 5) we can
customize epics, tasks and subtasks configurations however we want
to. In this example, I only placed a priority field on description camps,
and the estimate for context camps on tasks/sub-tasks. You can chose
whatever options you feel like are important to you and to your work.

Figure 5: Epics, tasks and sub-tasks configurations

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João Pedro Ramalho Monteiro Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal

After saving our configurations, we can edit tasks and sub-tasks work-
flow by clicking on the highlighted button on Figure 5. In this page
(Figure 6) we can add new status, transitions from a state to another
and different rules. Since we are creating the workflow for an academic
duty, we should create an ”In-Progress status” called ”In Revision” in
order to make sure that when a task is done, we can actually mark it
as ”In Revision” and get back to it whenever we feel like it. After this,
you should get something like what is represented in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Epics, tasks and sub-tasks - Workflow

We can also create additional types of problems, like bugs, errors, use
cases... There are infinite options, it’s all up to you!

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João Pedro Ramalho Monteiro Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal

• Third step (Creating tasks): Having our project configurations

done, we can start creating tasks and aligning our work. Go the created
epic’s technical page and click on the highlighted button on Figure 7.

Figure 7: Button to creat tasks.

On this example, I’ve already created my first task, added a comment,

set its priority to highest estimated with 2 hours and assigned it to my
colleague (Figure 8).

Figure 8: Task info.

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João Pedro Ramalho Monteiro Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal

If I go back to the main page, I can see that the Kanban Board already
contains the task I’ve created and I can confirm that it is in progress
(Figure 9).

Figure 9: Kanban board.

• Fourth step: Now that you know the basics of Jira, it’s up to you to
configure it and organize your work as good as you want to. Go ahead
and create all the tasks you think will represent quality’s software work
you have to do, and have fun!

I appreciate everyone’s collaboration, and I’ll be available for questions.

Good work!

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