Working with issues

Need help working with issues? In Jira Software, you can create issues, estimate issues, even manage your code via issues. On this page, you'll find a quick overview for everything that you can do with an issue, such as creating issues, updating issues with estimates, creating branches in your source repository that reference the relevant issues in Jira Software, viewing development work for issues, resolving issues, as well as links to pages with more detail.This page introduces you to the concept of an issue. You can then learn more about creating, editing, and collaborating issues in the Next steps section.

On this page:

What is an issue?

Different organizations use Jira applications to track different kinds of issues, which can represent anything from a software bug, a project task, to a leave request form.

Issues are the building blocks of any Jira project. An issue could represent a story, a bug, a task, etc in your project. This is what an issue looks like in Jira Software:

 On a board (Scrum project — backlog) 

  1. Selected issue.
  2. Issue actions.
  3. Issue detail view.

Full view (e.g. via search results) 


  1. Project, key, and summary.
  2. Issue actions, including workflow transitions menu.
  3. Activity tabs that feature all changes related to the issue.
  4. Share and export issue.
  5. Development panel.
  6. Agile panel.

The issue detail view may show different fields to the full view if it has been customized by your administrator. To see the full view, open the issue in a new tab/window (e.g. click the issue key with your middle mouse button).

Most information on an issue is self-explanatory. Here are a few things to be aware of though:

Why can't I see the development panel?
This panel only shows if Jira is connected to your development tools. You will be able to see related commits, builds, etc, to help you evaluate the development status of your issue. See Viewing the development information for an issue.
Why can't I see the Time Tracking panel?

This panel will be shown on the issue, if your administrator has set Time Tracking to 'Remaining Estimate and Time Spent'. If an issue has sub-tasks, the Remaining estimate for the issue plus sub-tasks is rolled up into the parent issue.

What activity is shown in the History and Activity tabs?

The History tab of an issue records the following information: creator of the issue (this may be the same as the reporter, but can be distinct), changes to an issue field, attachment of a file, deletion of a comment, deletion of a worklog, creation or deletion of an issue link.

The Activity tab has the same information, plus additional information, such as comments. However, this may load more slowly, especially if there has been a lot of activity on the issue.

Next steps

Check out the following pages to reach issue ninja status:   

Last modified on Jun 20, 2022

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