What is Jira used for?
Jira Software is part of a family of products designed to help teams of all types manage work. Originally, Jira was designed as a bug and issue tracker. But today, Jira has evolved into a powerful work management tool for all kinds of use cases, from requirements and test case management to agile software development.
In this guide, you'll learn which features and functionalities of Jira can help your team with your unique needs. Explore how to start your project off right with pre-configured templates in Jira. Go to the template library
This guide is for Jira Software Cloud. If you're using Jira Software Server or Data Center, some of the features listed on this page may vary. Not sure which Jira you have? This guide can help >>
Jira for requirements & test case management
An increasing number of teams today are developing more iteratively, and Jira Software is the central hub for the coding, collaboration, and release stages. For test management, Jira integrates with a variety of add-ons so the QA’s testing slides seamlessly into the software development cycle. Teams can test effectively and iteratively. QA teams use Jira issues, customized screens, fields, and workflows to manage manual and automated tests.
How to do requirements management with Jira in conjunction with other tools?
Explore the Atlassian Marketplace to see all the vendors that provide test management capabilities within Jira.
Jira for agile teams
For teams who practice agile methodologies, Jira Software provides scrum and kanban boards out-of-the-box. Boards are task management hubs, where tasks are mapped to customizable workflows. Boards provide transparency across teamwork and visibility into the status of every work item. Time tracking capabilities and real-time performance reports (burn-up/down charts, sprint reports, velocity charts) enable teams to closely monitor their productivity over time.
Jira Software supports any agile methodology for software development. Learn more
Whether you are doing scrum, kanban, or something in between, see how Jira can help your team stay on track.
Jira for project management teams
Jira Software can be configured to fit any type of project. Teams can start with a project template or create their own custom workflow. Jira issues, also known as tasks, track each piece of work that needs to pass through the workflow steps to completion. Customizable permissions enable admins to determine who can see and perform which actions. With all project information in place, reports can be generated to track progress, productivity, and ensure nothing slips.
Jira Software can help your team manage a project from the start, through execution, to the wrap-up.
Jira for software development teams
Jira Software provides planning and roadmap tools so teams can manage stakeholders, budgets, and feature requirements from day one. Jira integrates with a variety of CI/CD tools to facilitate transparency throughout the software development life cycle. When it’s ready to deploy, live production code status information is surfaced in the Jira issue. Integrated feature flagging tools allow teams to roll out new features gradually and safely.
The DevOps template is designed for high-performing teams to save time and reduce errors by managing work from a variety of tools in one centralized place. Learn more
Jira Software helps you focus on shipping better software, faster, by integrating with Atlassian and vendor tools.
Jira Software for DevOps teams
DevOps is a set of practices that works to automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams, so they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably. For teams practicing DevOps, Jira Software is the backbone of Atlassian’s open, integrated toolchain known as Open DevOps. Jira Software integrates with first- and third-party tools throughout the DevOps lifecycle, including code and version control tools like Bitbucket, GitHub, and Gitlab, documentation and knowledge management tools like Confluence, and monitoring and operating tools like Opsgenie. Jira Software also integrates with tools across a variety of categories to help DevOps teams ship better software, faster, with a focus on best practices including:
Build, ship, and operate great software. Get started with Atlassian Open DevOps.
Jira for product management teams
In Jira Software, teams can build a roadmap that’s associated with each project. The roadmap enables teams to sketch out the longer-term view of their work as well as track and share progress for their roadmap. Add more detail to your roadmaps, surfacing dependencies and forecasts for when you might complete your work. Create a view highlighting ‘live’ roadmaps from multiple teams by embedding the Jira Software roadmap into Confluence.
Build detailed roadmaps, manage dependencies, and share plans and progress.
Jira for task management
Create tasks for yourself and members of your team to work on, complete with its details, due dates, and reminders. Utilize subtasks to breakdown larger items of work. Allow others to watch the task to track its progress and be notified when it’s completed. Create sub-tasks within the parent task to break down the unit of work into digestible pieces for various members of the team. View all tasks on the board to easily visualize each’s status.
Email notifications
Issue hierarchy
Subtasks
Task change log / history
Custom fields
Task linking / relationships
Project linking
Learn about epics, stories, and themes in Jira Software - and how these simple structures can help you manage your work.
Jira for bug tracking
Bugs are just a name for to-do's stemming from problems within the software a team is building. It is important for teams to view all the tasks and bugs in the backlog so they can prioritize big picture goals. Jira’s powerful workflow engine ensures that bugs are automatically assigned and prioritized once they are captured. Teams can then track a bug through to completion.
Product / Issue backlog
Customizable workflows
Email notifications
Task / bug linking
Project level configuration
Project rules
See how Jira Software can help you capture, track, and resolve bugs and issues throughout your entire development process.
Glossary of items
Backlogs
A backlog contains outstanding issues for a team to work on.
Epics, User Stories, Issues
An epic represents a large body of work, which may require several sprints to complete. Multiple user stories comprise an epic. A Jira issue represents a single piece of work in a project.
Time Tracking
Time tracking allows teams to record the amount of time they spend working on issues.
Custom workflows
Teams can create custom workflows to drive the progression of issues on a scrum or kanban board.
Roadmaps
Roadmaps create a visual representation of all the epics a team is working on, so teams can plan large pieces of work in advance.
Advanced search
Advanced search uses Jira Query Language (JQL) to search for specific criteria in issues that can’t be done in quick or basic searches.
Permissions
Utilize permissions to grant team members different levels of access and to lock down sensitive information.