▶Book Description
Atlassian JIRA is an enterprise-issue tracker system. One of its key strengths is its ability to adapt to the needs of the organization, ranging from building Atlassian application interfaces to providing a platform for add-ons to extend JIRA's capabilities.
JIRA 7 Essentials, now in its fourth edition, provides a comprehensive explanation covering all major components of JIRA 7, which includes JIRA Software, JIRA Core, and JIRA Service Works.
The book starts by explaining how to plan and set up a new JIRA 7 instance from scratch for production use before moving on to the more key features such as e-mails, workflows, business processes, and so on. Then you will understand JIRA's data hierarchy and how to design and work with projects in JIRA.
Issues being the corner stone of using JIRA, you will gain a deep understanding of issues and their purpose. Then you will be introduced to fields and how to use custom fields for more effective data collections. You will then learn to create new screens from scratch and customize it to suit your needs. The book then covers workflows and business processes, and you will also be able to set up both incoming and outgoing mail servers to work with e-mails. Towards the end, we explain JIRA's security model and introduce you to one of JIRA’s new add-ons: JIRA Service Desk, which allows you to run JIRA as a computer support portal.
▶What You Will Learn
⦁ Understand JIRA's data hierarchy and how to design and work with projects in JIRA
⦁ Plan and set up a new JIRA 7 instance from scratch for production use
⦁ Using 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
▶Key Features
⦁ Updated for JIRA 7, this book covers all the new features introduced in JIRA 7 with a dedicated chapter on JIRA Service Desk—one of the biggest new add-ons to JIRA
⦁ This book lays a strong foundation to work with agile projects in JIRA from both the administrator and end user's perspective
⦁ Work through step-by-step exercises at the end of each chapter for you to try out and reinforce your skills
▶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.
▶What this book covers
This book is organized into eleven chapters. The first chapter starts with setting up your own JIRA, and the subsequent chapters will introduce key features and concepts. With each chapter, you will learn about important concepts such as business processes, workflows, emails, and notifications. You will also have the opportunity to put your newly acquired knowledge into practice by following a live JIRA sample implementation.
⦁ Chapter 1, Getting Started with JIRA, serves as the starting point of the book and aims to guide you to set up a local copy of a JIRA Software application that will be used throughout the book. For seasoned JIRA experts, this will both refresh your knowledge and also introduce you to the changes in JIRA 7. By the end of this chapter, you should have a running JIRA application.
⦁ Chapter 2, Using JIRA for Business Projects, covers using JIRA for projects that are not based on software development, for example, a generic task management solution. This chapter focuses on use the basic features of JIRA, which are offered through the JIRA Core product, which is bundled with JIRA Software.
⦁ Chapter 3, Using JIRA for Agile Projects, covers features specific to JIRA Software. This chapter focuses on using JIRA for software development projects, especially using Agile methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban.
⦁ Chapter 4, Issue Management, covers everything related to issue creation and the operations that can be performed on an issue (excluding workflow transitions). Furthermore, this chapter touches on the various aspects of issues, as they are the focal point of JIRA. This chapter also serves as an opportunity to show and allow you to set up dummy data that will be used by the sample project.
⦁ Chapter 5, Field Management, covers how JIRA collects data through the use of fields and how to expand on this ability through the use of custom fields. This chapter then continues with the various behaviors that can be configured for fields.
⦁ Chapter 6, Screen Management, builds on the preceding chapter and explores the concept of screens and how users can create and manage their own screens. This chapter ties in all the previous chapters to show the power behind JIRA's screen design capabilities.
⦁ Chapter 7, Workflow and Business Process, explores the most powerful feature offered by JIRA, workflows. The concept of issue life cycles is introduced, and various aspects of workflows explained. This chapter also explores the relationship between workflows and other various JIRA aspects that have been previously covered, such as screens. The concept of JIRA add-ons is also briefly touched upon in the sample project, using some popular addons.
⦁ Chapter 8, E-mails and Notifications, focuses on how to get automatic e-mail notifications from JIRA and explores the different settings that can be applied. This is a very important and powerful feature of JIRA and also a critical part of the example project featured in this book. This chapter also ties in the workflow chapter and explains in detail how JIRA manages its notification mechanism.
⦁ Chapter 9, Securing JIRA, focuses on the different security control features offered by JIRA. As this topic affects all aspects of JIRA, all previous topics are touched on, explaining how security can be applied to each. It also covers LDAP integration, where you can hook up your JIRA with an existing LDAP system for user management.
⦁ Chapter 10, Searching, Reporting, and Analysis, focuses on how data captured in JIRA can be retrieved to provide various types of reporting features. It also covers the changes introduced in JIRA 7.
⦁ Chapter 11, JIRA Service Desk, covers the new JIRA Service Desk product from the JIRA 7 product family. It transforms JIRA into a fully fledged service desk solution. This chapter looks at setting up and customizing service desks, integrating with Atlassian Confluence to set up a knowledge base, and defining custom SLA metrics.
