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What is a board in Jira Software?

A board displays your team’s work as cards you can move between columns. In Jira Software, cards and the tasks they represent are called “issues”.

Usually, your board reflects your team’s process, tracking the status of work as it makes its way through your team’s process.

The columns on your board represent the status of your team’s issues. This visual representation of your team’s work helps you discuss and track the progress of your project from start to finish.

While the roadmap can help you plan and track large initiatives over weeks, months, and quarters, the board is more tactical. It gives you a status of the work your team is currently carrying out, usually over the next week or two. Note that a board can display up to 5,000 issues at a time.

Your team-managed board or company-managed board comes with the following default status columns:

  • “To do”, the first column on the board

  • “In progress”

  • “Done”, the last column on the board

Cards in the first column on your team-managed board or company-managed board (from left to right) are always categorized as to do, meaning no progress has started on carrying out the task.

Cards in the last column of your team-managed board or company-managed board are always categorized as done, meaning all work has been completed and the task has been carried out. If you’ve enabled the sprints feature, these issues won’t return to the backlog when you complete your sprint. If you don’t have the sprints feature enabled, these issues are automatically removed from the board after 14 days.

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