What is JIRA?

JIRA from Atlassian is an issue or bug-tracking tracking and project management product. JIRA provides a web interface for a project manager or a risk manager\analyst to maintain an organized process to create issues and to track those issues. It tightly integrates with Bitbucket version control system to deliver an all round SDLC framework for code maintainence and reproducible research projects.

As a project manager one can also setup workflows for your team. For example simple workflows can

  • Start with opening a task

  • Sometimes tasks may be immediately closed for whatever reason

  • Or the task moves to the next phase work in progress

  • Task could either then move to on hold or resolved

  • If task in on hold area it could move to closed or back to work in progress

  • If a task is resolved then next it can move to closed

  • If task is closed it could be reopened for whatever reason and the cycle starts again

There are other more complicated work flows than this for issue types like defects or enhancement requests are required. Issue types usually fall in 4 major classes

  • Defect

  • Enhancement Request

  • New Feature

  • Task

Though the issue types are quite self explanatory I will go into details of these request types at a later stage and show the organized flow of each issue type. The workflow figure you see on top is of the Task issue type. If you would like to jump directly to that chapter please follow this link How to tag a release.

JIRA also allows you to categorize the type of project you work on. Categories could be "production" to signify that the issue raised is on production code. Another example is "research" to signify that an issue raised is related to research type projects.

Additional features of JIRA is that it shows you real time progress of all project within a category or projects from a particular issue type or time used by assigned people. This provide statistics to help project managers forecast work plans for his\her team when assigning code maintainence tasks or research projects.

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