JIRA – AN INTRODUCTION

Consider a real life work scenario, where we come across the issues with the product under test and as a team we need to communicate and report among a set of people. We can do it by floating emails to the DL which can become cumbersome to manage and keep track with the progress of the issue and moreover it will be difficult to go back to the history to trace the progress. Also, keeping up with the records over excels or MS word documents can create issues with the file getting overridden if used among a group of people and the data can be lost within the check-in and check-out of the file in use. To overcome with these work hassles and need for proper project and issues management Jira came into picture. It is an issueand project tracking product, developed by Atlassian.

It helps to track and report the requirements, enhancements, defects, tasks or user stories. It helps different teams to organise the work at hand and easily manage overall activities associated with software development. Jira supports cross browsers, platforms and devices and is easily accessible to track outstanding issues and pending user stories. It is usually an open system where all the team progress activities can be reviewed and required actions can be planned. Agile development is easy when using Jira as it aids for development iterations and reporting along with bug tracking functionality.

FEATURES OF JIRA

ISSUE MANAGEMENT OVERVIEW

Before we get into JIRA, let’s first take an overview of issue management in production support.

1. For any discrepancies with the requirements issue or incident should be created.
2. Issue should have a unique identification number.
3. In the Issue ticket – we should provide summary, steps of reproduction, browser having issue, screenshots and all the necessary information should be documented and it should be easy to understand.
4. As the issue ticket progresses, its status should be changed until it is completed or closed.
5. All the steps taken as the status of ticket changed should be well defined and documented and should be available for tracking.
6. An issue may be linked to other issue tickets as well if required for example – in case of duplicate issues or dependent issues.
7. Required teams should be regularly informed and posted with notifications.
8. Comments and feedback can be recorded on the issue ticket from ticket participants. Participants could be the team member, testers, project manager etc.
9. If needed issue should be searchable with required keywords.
10. Complete issue or its report can be pulled if needed for senior management supervision.

All of the above mentioned activities for issue management could be achieved using the JIRA tool. Let us take a look on a problem ticket and see how can we achieve the issue logging using JIRA.

STEPS TO CREATE ISSUE USING JIRA

Step 1: Log into JIRA after entering your credentials.

Step 2: Select the project to be worked on. Click on the Projects dropdown menu, it will display all the projects.

Step 3: Next is to create an issue within the project after clicking Create issue button as shown in the below screenshot.

Step 4: This will open up create issue dialogue box where you can enter a summary title for the problem ticket. Also, we can choose the issue type. Click on the create button to create the issue.

Step 5: This will create an issue with unique identification number.

Step 6: Enter as many details as available, upload files or problem screenshot, assign ticket to the assignee, add participants if needed. It is very easy to save and update details without entire screen to reload.

Step 7: Just on click on button description can be added or updated. Using the comment button below participants of this ticket can comment on the progress and provide feedback. Also there is the provision given to view the work log, history and the activity.

So the ticket is ready and using this JIRA tool we can do all the operations required as a part of issue management or incident management as discussed before.
About the author

Sanah, has 6 years of experience in the field of software quality. She has worked with various MNC’s in this short span of time and has been awarded with various awards. She is ISTQB certified and is currently residing in Arizona, USA. When she is not ensuring an application is release defect free she likes to cuddle up dogs at the puppies meet or catch up movies