What is JIRA Tool ? » BACareers, The Business Analyst Blog

What is JIRA Tool?

What is JIRA?

Initially I was also thinking what is JIRA and how to use JIRA, JIRA is a project management tool. It can be used to track the requirements status like what is the current status of the requirement assigned to user whether it is open or closed or under processing.

We will discuss in detail what is JIRA and advantages of using JIRA?

Here I am not going to explain how to use JIRA and all, I am trying to provide overview about JIRA tool.

What is JIRA?

JIRAis a tool developed by Australian Company Atlassian. This software is used for bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management. The name “JIRA” is actually inherited from the Japanese word “Gojira” which means “Godzilla”. The basic use of this tool is to track issue and bugs related to our project.

Jira is especially useful for software development because it has built in templates that can be used to help you create a software development project.

For example Jira has a Scrum template that can be customized to fit in with your requirements.

The template can be used to create the development project, once your development project is created, then you can create your backlog, plan your sprints, and your software releases.

A Scrum board would also be created with different columns. The columns show the different status that the cards are in such as backlog, development, Quality Assurance (Q & A), demo and closed which shows the status of the cards.

A kanban board also already available, we can customize as per our requirement. We can use Scrum board or Kanban board as per our requirement.

Has below standard formats.

Scrum board tracking.
Kanban board tracking
Cumulative flow charts.
Burn down charts.
Sprint reports.

We can create customized boards as per our requirement. It helps us to understand how many tasks we have and what the status of each task is.

Assume we have 5 developers in our team, and we have 50 requirements in our hand, and out of 50 requirements 20 prioritized. So here we need to assign these tasks to our developers.

So here I can customize the boards and fields as per my requirement. If we observe in above example 30 requirements yet to prioritized so I can mark status as “to be process” and 20 requirements I need to assign to my developers. So we can assign 4 tasks to each of the developers and I can give the due dates also as per the requirement.

As per above example 4 I assigned to X and 4 assigned to Z, so here I can track the requirements x is having how many tasks in his bucket and how much time required to complete the task and actual hours taken to complete the task.

We can track the same for Issues also.

Issue Tracking : Jira can also be used to track issues during software development. It can be used to identify and create new issue tasks, prioritize issues for completion, and track them using a workflow.

You can specify details about the issue which helps with replications and resolution.

Time tracking: Jira can be used to keep track of the the time spent on tasks and issues. This would help with future sprints planning. The time tracking views available include :

Working hours per day
Working hours per week

WorkFlows

A JIRA workflow is a set of statuses and transitions that an issue goes through during its lifecycle. JIRA workflow encompasses five main stages once the issue is created.