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JIRA

Jira is a suite of agile work management solutions that powers collaboration across all teams from concept to customer, empowering you to do the best work of your life, together. Jira offers several products and deployment options that are purpose-built for Software, IT, Business, Ops teams, and more. Read on to see which is right for you.

Key terms

- Issues

A Jira 'issue' refers to a single work item of any type or size that is tracked from creation to completion. For example, an issue could be a feature being developed by a software team, a to-do item for a marketing team, or a contract that needs to be written by a legal team.

💡Tip: Other commonly used terms for issues are 'requests', 'tickets' or 'tasks'. We recommend using 'issues' to help your team stay on the same page when working across the Jira product family. 

- Projects

A project is, quite simply, a collection of issues that are held in common by purpose or context. Issues grouped into projects can be configured in a variety of ways, ranging from visibility restrictions to available workflows.

Jira Software projects are flexible working spaces that allow you to group like issues by team, business unit, product, or stream of work. Projects don't need to be tied to the same delivery date.

For example, if you group your issues by team, you could have a marketing project, a development project, and a legal project, all of which would track ongoing work of those particular teams. Every issue would be represented by an issue keys (specific to a project) and an issue number, i.e. MKT-13, DEV-4, LEG-1.

- Boards

A board in Jira software is a part of a project that displays issues giving teams a flexible way to view, manage, and reporting on work in progress. Simply put, a board is a visual representation of a team’s workflow within a project.

- Agile

Agile is not a Jira Software-specific term. It's a work philosophy that originated in the software development field and has since expanded to a variety of other industries. While we won't belabor the definition here (there are great agile resources for that!), agile emphasizes an iterative approach to work informed by customer feedback where delivery occurs incrementally and continuously.

The ideal agile team can move quickly and adapt to changing requirements without missing much of a beat.

Sprint Planning

Sprint planning is an event in scrum that kicks off the sprint. The purpose of sprint planning is to define what can be delivered in the sprint and how that work will be achieved. Sprint planning is done in collaboration with the whole scrum team. In scrum, the sprint is a set period of time where all the work is done. However, before you can leap into action you have to set up the sprint. You need to decide on how long the time box is going to be, the sprint goal, and where you're going to start.

The sprint planning session kicks off the sprint by setting the agenda and focus. If done correctly, it also creates an environment where the team is motivated, challenged, and can be successful. Bad sprint plans can derail the team by setting unrealistic expectations.