Configure your software project
 | Learn how to best configure JIRA Software for your team so they can spend more time developing great software instead of wrangling issues. This page will introduce you to scrum project estimates and basic project settings you can configure for your team. |
Configure estimation and tracking
One of the first things you need to do for a new scrum project is to configure estimation (used to measure the amount of work in the backlog) and tracking (used to measure the amount of time spent on a sprint). This is essential for understanding how much work your team has and how much it can do, as you build a backlog, run sprints, and review reports.
In a new scrum project, you can use story points to measure both estimation and tracking, as outlined in these steps:
- Navigate to your scrum project's board, then click Board > Configure.
- Click the Estimation tab.
- In the Estimation Statistic field, select Story Points. Leave the Time Tracking field set to None.
An overview of project settings
Once you have started a software project and configured your first board, you can continue to configure your project to suit to your team's needs. To get started, open your new project and select Project settings in the bottom left corner to check out the following:
| Setting | Details |
|---|---|
| Issue types | JIRA Software lets you keep track of different types of work, from bugs to tasks to stories, by using different issue types. You can customize each issue type to follow a different process (or workflow) or track different pieces of information. In Project settings, select Issue Types in the left menu to edit the issues types that can be used in your new projects. Select one of the available issue types in the left menu (e.g. Bug) to further customize it. To learn more about issue types, check out Associating issue types with projects in the Administering JIRA Cloud docs. |
| Workflows | Your JIRA Software issues can follow a process that mirrors your team's practices. A workflow defines the sequence of steps (or statuses) that an issue will follow, e.g. Open, In Progress, Resolved. You can configure how issues will transition between statuses, e.g. who can transition them, under what conditions, and which screen will be displayed for each transition. To learn more about workflows, check out Working with workflows in the Administering JIRA Cloud docs. |
| Screens | JIRA Software allows you to display particular pieces of issue information at particular times by defining screens. A screen is simply a collection of fields. You can choose which screen to display when an issue is being created, viewed, edited, or transitioned through a particular step in a workflow. To learn more about screens, check out Defining a screen in the Administering JIRA Cloud docs. |
| Custom fields | JIRA Software lets you to add any number of custom fields, so your team can request the right information at the right time when working on an issue. You can control the way a custom field is formatted and what members of your team can use it. To learn more about custom fields, check out 2020-01-31_06-08-39_Adding, editing, and deleting a custom field in the Administering JIRA Cloud docs. |
