What is a Project?

A JIRA project is a collection of issues, and is defined according to your organisation's requirements. For example, a JIRA project could be:

• a software development project
• a marketing campaign
• a helpdesk system
• a leave request management system
• a website enhancement request system

Every issue belongs to a project. Each project has a name (e.g. Website Issues) and a key (e.g. WEB). The project key becomes the first part of that project's issue keys, e.g. WEB-101, WEB-102, etc:

What is a component?

A project component is a logical grouping of issues within a project. Each project may consist of various components (or none), depending on your organisation's needs.

For example, a software development project could consist of components called 'Documentation', 'Backend', 'Email Subsystem', 'GUI'. A website enhancement request system might consist of components called 'Products', 'Contact Us', etc:

An issue can belong to zero, one or multiple components within a project.

What is a version?

For some types of projects, particularly software development, it is useful to be able to associate an issue with a particular project version (e.g. 1.0 beta, 1.0, 1.2, 2.0).

Issues have two fields that relate to versions:

• Affects Version(s) — this is the version(s) in which the issue is manifesting. For instance, a software bug might affect versions 1.1 and 1.2.
• Fix Version(s) — this is the version(s) in which the issue was (or will be) fixed. For instance, the bug affecting versions 1.1 and 1.2 might be fixed in version 2.0. Note that issues which do not have a Fix Version are classified as 'Unscheduled', as shown in the screenshot above.

Versions can be in one of three states: Released, Unreleased or Archived. Versions can also have a Release Date, and will automatically be highlighted as 'overdue' if the version is Unreleased when this date passes.

Additional Resources

• See 'Browsing a Project' for information on looking up a project's structure and issues.
• See the JIRA Administrator's Guide for information on defining projects, components and versions.
• Watch the 'Adding a Project' tutorial video to see how a project is added in JIRA. Please note the JIRA version and JIRA edition of the tutorial video before watching.