What is a project?
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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
To see a quick snapshot of a project, click 'Browse Project' in JIRA's main menu bar, then select the
project of interest. The 'Open Issues' report will be displayed as shown below, showing a summary of
the project's components and versions — click on
the component or version to see a list of all issues
belonging to that component/version. A number of other reports are also
available.
Every issue belongs to a project. Each project has a name
(e.g. Website Issues) and a key (eg. 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.
