Configuring a project

Still need help?

The Atlassian Community is here for you.

Ask the community

Your issue tracker should be the hub of your development project. When properly configured, Jira Software helps your team members prioritize and organize work better, so they can spend more time developing great software instead of wrangling issues.

A project is simply a collection of issues (stories, bugs, tasks, etc). You would typically use a project to represent the development work for a product, project, or service in Jira Software.

Scrum or Kanban? Scrum has an iteration-based approach, which is generally a good fit for teams developing products, particularly if your team is releasing new versions on a regular schedule. Kanban is better suited for a continuous flow of work (e.g. service-oriented teams), where its constraint-based approach helps prevent your team from being overloaded.

Before you begin

Ideally, you should be a Jira administrator (i.e. someone with the 'Jira Administrators' global permission), if you want to set up a new project in Jira Software. Many of the tasks involved can only be performed by a JIRA administrator, such as creating a project, modifying a workflow, etc. For more information, see Permissions overview.

Overview

The topics in this section cover the activities that you will need to do when configuring a project:

Create a project

Your first task is to create a Software project  and configure it according to the needs and requirements of your development team. You need to be a Jira administrator to create a project, but you can configure most project details (e.g. name, avatar, etc) if you are a project administrator.

Learn more: Defining a project (Jira Admin documentation)

Configure the board for your project

A board is the central tool for working with issues in a Scrum or Kanban development project. A Scrum or Kanban board will be created when you create a Scrum or Kanban development project respectively. You can add more boards (of either type) to the project, if you like.

Learn more: Configuring a board

Configure project permissions

You can control access to your project by configuring a permission scheme. A permission scheme maps users, user groups, roles, etc to the project functions (e.g. Assign issues). Your new project will be pre-configured with the default permission scheme.

Learn more: Managing project role memberships

Tweak issue types, workflow, screens, and fields 

Your project is pre-configured with issue types, a workflow, screens, and fields. You can change these to suit any development process. For example, you may want to create a 'Design' issue type or add a 'QA review' step to your workflow.

Learn more: Defining issue type field valuesWorkflowsDefining a screenJIRA custom fields (Jira Admin documentation)

Create components

Components can be used to group issues in a project. However, in an agile project, you should consider using epics to group issues (stories) instead, as there are more features that support working with epics, like the epic column on boards, reports, etc.

Learn more: Managing components

Last modified on May 11, 2018

Was this helpful?

Yes
No
Provide feedback about this article
Powered by Confluence and Scroll Viewport.