Jira 8 Essentials

Effective issue management and project tracking with the latest Jira features, 5th Edition

Patrick Li

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789808193
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Publisher's note: A new sixth edition, updated with enhanced Jira 8.21 and Data Center features has now been published.

Key Features

• Work on agile projects in Jira from both the administrator and end user's perspective
• Explore the improved Scrum and Kanban board and backlog
• Work through exercises at the end of each chapter to reinforce your skills

Book Description

Atlassian Jira enables effective bug tracking for your software and mobile applications and provides tools to track and manage tasks for your projects. Jira Essentials is a comprehensive guide, now updated to Jira 8 to include enhanced features such as updates to Scrum and Kanban UI, additional search capabilities, and changes to Jira Service Desk.

The book starts by explaining how to plan and set up a new Jira 8 instance from scratch before getting you acquainted with key features such as emails, workflows, business processes, and much more. You'll then understand Jira's data hierarchy and how to design and work with projects.

Since Jira is used for issue management, this book delves into the different issues that can arise in your projects. You'll explore fields, including custom fields, and learn to use them for more effective data collection. You'll create new screens from scratch and customize them to suit your requirements. The book also covers workflows and business processes, and guides you in setting up incoming and outgoing mail servers. Toward the end, you'll study Jira's security model and Jira Service Desk, which allows you to run Jira as a support portal.

By the end of this Jira book, you will be able to implement Jira 8 in your projects with ease.

What you will learn

• Understand Jira's data hierarchy and how to design and work with projects in Jira
• Use Jira for agile software projects, business process management, customer service support, and more
• Understand issues and work with them
• Design both system and custom fields to behave differently under different contexts
• Create and design your own screens and apply them to different project and issue types
• Gain an understanding of the workflow and its various components
• Set up both incoming and outgoing mail servers to work with e-mails

Who this book is for

This book will be especially useful for project managers but it's also intended for other Jira users, including developers, and any other industry besides software development, who would like to leverage Jira's powerful task management and workflow features to better manage their business processes.

Section 1: Introduction to Jira 8

In this section, you will learn how to set up a new Jira 8 instance from scratch, followed by how to use Jira for your business and agile projects.

The following chapters will be covered in this section:

• Chapter 1, Getting Started with Jira
• Chapter 2, Using Jira for Business Projects
• Chapter 3, Using Jira for Agile Projects

Getting Started with Jira

In this chapter, we will start with a high-level view of Jira, going through each of the components that make up the overall application. We will then examine the various deployment options, system requirements for Jira 8, and the platforms/software that are supported. Finally, we will get our hands dirty by installing our very own Jira 8 from scratch with the installation wizard. Finally, we will also cover some post-installation steps, such as setting up SSL to secure our new instance.

By the end of this chapter, you will have learned about the following:

• The different offerings from the Jira product family
• The overall architecture of Jira
• The basic hardware and software requirements to deploy and run Jira
• Platforms and applications supported by Jira
• Installing Jira and all of the required software
• Post-installation configuration options to customize your Jira

Jira Core, Jira Software, and Jira Service Desk

Starting with Jira 7, Jira is split into three different products, and the term Jira now refers to the common platform that all these products are built on. The three products that make up the Jira family are as follows:

• Jira Core: This is similar to the classic Jira (also known as JIRA), with all the field customizations and workflow capabilities. This is perfect for general-purpose task management.
• Jira Software: This is Jira Core with agile capabilities (previously known as JIRA Agile). This is well-suited for software development teams that want to use agile methodologies, such as Scrum and Kanban.
• Jira Service Desk: This is Jira Core with service desk capabilities. This is designed for running Jira as a support ticketing system, with a simplified user interface for the end users, and a focus on customer satisfaction with SLA goals.

As you can see, Jira Core is at the heart, providing all the base functionalities, such as user interface customization, workflows, and email notifications, while Jira Software and Jira Service Desk add specialized features on top of it.

In this book, we will mostly focus on Jira Software. However, since Jira Core provides many of the common features, most of the knowledge is also applicable to Jira Core, and features that are only available to Jira Software will be highlighted. For this reason, the term Jira will be used to cover both Jira Core and Jira Software, unless a distinction is required. We will also cover Jira Service Desk in Chapter 11, Jira Service Desk.

The Jira architecture

Installing Jira is simple and straightforward. However, it is important for you to understand the components that make up the overall architecture of Jira and the installation options that are available. This will help you make an informed decision and be better prepared for future maintenance and troubleshooting, as well as establishing some common terminologies that are often used by the user community and Atlassian support representatives.

High-level architecture

Atlassian provides a comprehensive overview of the Jira architecture at https://developer.atlassian.com/server/jira/platform/architecture-overview. However, with regards to the day-to-day administration and utilization of Jira, we do not need to go into the details of this; the information provided can be overwhelming at first glance. For this reason, we have summarized a high-level overview, which highlights the most important components in the architecture, as shown in the following diagram:

Web browsers

Jira is a web application, so there is no need for users to install anything on their machines. All they need is a web browser that is compatible with Jira. The following table summarizes the browser requirements for Jira:

Browsers	Compatibility
Internet Explorer	11 and Edge
Mozilla Firefox	Latest stable versions
Safari	Latest stable versions on mac OSX
Google Chrome	Latest stable versions
Mobile	Mobile Safari on iOS only Mobile Chrome

Application services

The application services layer contains all the functions and services provided by Jira. These services include various business functions, such as workflow and notification, which will be discussed in depth in Chapter 7, Workflow and Business Process, and Chapter 8, Emails and Notifications, respectively. Other services, such as REST/Web Service, provide integration points to other applications, and the OSGi service provides the base add-on framework to extend Jira's functionalities.

Data storage

The data storage layer stores persistent data in several places within Jira. Most business data, such as projects and issues, are stored in a relational database. Content such as uploaded attachments and search indexes are stored in the filesystem in the JIRA_HOME directory, which we will talk about in the next section. The underlying relational database that's used is transparent to users, and you can migrate from one database to another with ease, as referenced at https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/switching-databases-938846867.html.

The Jira installation directory

The Jira installation directory is where you install Jira. It contains all the executable and configuration files of the application. Jira neither modifies the contents of the files in this directory during runtime, nor does it store any data files inside the directory. The directory is used primarily for execution. For the remainder of this book, we will refer to this directory as JIRA_INSTALL.

The Jira home directory

The Jira home directory contains key data and configuration files specific to each Jira instance, such as Jira's database connectivity details. As we will see later in this chapter, setting the path to this directory is part of the installation process.

There is a one-to-one ...