Note: Almost all videos have been updated to be based on the new JIRA UI. If you're using JIRA Server, the interface might be a bit different but the core functionality is still the same.
This course walks through all the core features and concepts of JIRA with real-world examples and has been catered for general users, managers and admins. It incorporates and uses some of the latest features released for JIRA Software on Cloud.
Plus bonus Confluence content added- learn how to use Confluence and how to take advantage of it in tandem with JIRA.
JIRA is a very comprehensive tool and one of the most popular agile project management tools out there. When used and configured correctly, it will help you work smarter, faster and more efficiently.
WHY TAKE THE COURSE:
- Lots of content - over 11 hours worth
- Learn the most important characteristics of Scrum and Kanban agile methodologies
- Cover the main aspects of JIRA including working within an agile team, leading an agile team, and administering the main things that make up JIRA
- Real-world examples including
- How to manage your daily task-list via a daily scrum-based process
- Configure permissions and projects for internal team members, as well as external members (Eg: consultants, customers etc)
- JIRA allows you to create stories and epics for agile projects - learn how to create another issue type used in agile called Spike and create custom screens, fields and workflows for this new issue type.
- Modify the default software development workflow to include steps for QA How to set up an icebox (features that aren't ready to go into the development backlog aka "put on ice") in JIRA
- How to build a completely new workflow to manage the approval of new work or feature requests, before being moved into the development backlog
- How to manage multiple teams working on the same projects via multiple agile boards catered to each team
- Support - I am only a message away from answering any questions you might have
STRUCTURE OF THE COURSE:
- Agile Concepts - Goes into detail with Scrum and Kanban methodologies. By the end of the section, you’ll have a full refresher on these methodologies as I made sure I hit the most important notes when it comes to how they work
- Working within an agile team - Get your first look at navigating the Jira user interface and learn how to create issues, work on issues through the agile boards, search for issues, create custom dashboards to see whats happening in Jira and other functions beneficial to any agile team member
- Leading an agile team - Configuring and managing agile boards, creating and maintaining the backlog as well as starting and ending sprints and creating releases. All these steps stay true to the agile steps described in the prior section
- Jira Administration - Goes over all the main administration sections and each part has an example that you can use to follow along with. By the end of this section, you will understand all the customizable aspects of Jira and be able to cater your own instance to fit your own specific needs
- Real-world examples, scenarios and bonus content - This is where I show you how I use Jira to track and forecast my personal day-to-day task-list, while using a daily scrum-based process, among other examples
BOTTOM LINE:
Bottom line is that I tried to make this course a comprehensive guide to Jira that anyone would need to either get introduced to JIRA or get fully up to speed with the basic concepts and features. I feel the best way of learning something is by example. And so I put in over 11 hours of content explaining the features and concepts with examples and am continuously working on adding more examples and scenarios to share my experience and knowledge in using JIRA within the real world.
I'll be here to help answer any questions you might have along the way
- There is no pre-requisite knowledge required to take this course
- If you're looking to practice or follow along with the videos, you would need access to a Jira Cloud instance via a web browser
- Understand what JIRA is, benefits of JIRA and how to use JIRA
- Understand Scrum - the stakeholders, events and overall flow of work
- Understand Kanban flow of work
- Use JIRA as a user working within an agile team - creating, working on and searching for issues, customizing dashboards etc
- Use JIRA as a manager of an agile team - configuring agile boards, managing the backlog, sprints and releases etc
- Administer all aspects of JIRA - create users, groups, set permissions, configure issue types, screens, fields, workflows etc
- Use examples presented in this course to customize and use JIRA based on your own unique needs
- Get ideas (through examples presented in the course) on how JIRA can be utilized for different scenarios or situations
- Learn the basics of Confluence
- Learn how you can use both JIRA and Confluence together to work better and be more productive in general
A quick look into what Jira is, why you should use it and your options for getting it.
A breakdown of the course and some logistical details around talking speed and how to go about the course depending on your knowledge of Jira
This section goes through the core concepts of scrum and kanban and then discusses the main Jira terms and how they relate to the agile processes
This lecture goes into details of how the scrum methodology works, and touches on all the key points about this agile process.
We'll define some of the key Jira terms like issues, projects, versions, and components
This section will introduce Jira and get you up to speed with the basic essentials to start working with Jira.
This will be our first look at the Jira Interface. We won't go into details of each screen but will get used to the UI and UX of this tool
This lecture goes through everything that makes up an issue in Jira
Our first look at the agile boards and how you can work on issues through the boards, and keep the board updated as you go.
A look at the Kanban agile board, as well as a new agile board created by JIRA (as of early 2018) - the Agility Board
Any team member may find the need to create issues, whether you're in QA and found a bug or even a Developer creating a ticket to be worked on.
As a member of an agile team using Jira, an essential function would be to search for issues through the issue navigator. This lecture goes through basic filters and searching capabilities on Jira
We'll take the last lecture and one-up it by searching using JQL. The video shows how you can switch between basic and advanced searches, and how basic searches let you learn about how you form your advanced search queries.
This lecture shows you how you can save your frequent searches, in order to be more efficient when using Jira and searching for issues
Dashboards provide a cool way to view different kinds of data within Jira, so we'll spend some time creating a custom dashboard that would display different kinds of information. We will also look at setting up a Wallboard which can be projected or displayed on a big monitor for the whole team to monitor or track important metrics relevant to the team
This section goes into a little more detail with using Jira, particularly when it comes to leading an agile team and making sure issues, backlogs, sprints and agile boards are properly set up and managed.
As a project owner, this would be one of the main responsibilities when managing an agile team and ensuring the agile boards are configured in a manner that maximizes productivity within the team. We will look at every single configurable aspect of agile boards, both scrum and kanban, over a couple of lectures.
This is a continuation of looking at all the ways you can configure agile boards, with focus on how you can make the boards visually relevant to your team
This last part of configuring agile boards focuses on the Kanban board and looks at the subtle differences between Kanban and Scrum board configuration.
As a project owner, the first step is to create a project of type that's relevant to you. The video looks at the steps involved in creating different types of projects. It also assumes that the project owner has administration privileges of creating a project and so if you don't, this is something you would need to request your Jira Administrator to create for you.
Once the project is set up, the next step would be to ensure that work is represented in the form of epics and stories
This lecture represents the stage where sprint planning meeting takes place, and the sprint backlog is created and the sprint started.
This video shows you how you can manage your versions, to represent software releases. Remember that in scrum, a version is pre-planned and is released when the planned work is complete
A version in Kanban can be released at any time and will contain all issues that are complete at that time. This video demonstrates how you can create a release for a Kanban based project.
This video shows you how you can create one agile board to display issues from multiple projects. An example where this would be relevant is if there are multiple teams working on different projects and the project owner wishes to visualize all development work and active sprints on one single board (eg: product owner can look at sprints for both backend and frontend teams on the same board)
This video represents the final stage of the scrum sprint cycle - closing sprints and viewing the reports that Jira generates for you. The reports are helpful in your sprint review and retrospective meeting to further improve the scrum process for your team
This section will turn you into a Jira Administration Guru and covers all the core functional aspects of Jira that you can configure and customize.
Before we get into the low level, we'll take a look at the Jira Administration pages and get used to the navigation flow between them
As a Jira Administrator for a team, one of the main steps would be to create accounts for users within your team and ensure they are given access to your Jira instance.
Once user accounts are created, it is beneficial to create groups and add users to their respective relevant groups. This makes it easier to assign permissions to groups rather than individuals.
This lecture discusses the main permission levels in Jira - Global permission and Project permissions. Jira also has Issue-level Permissions but we do not cover them as they are very low level and are uncommon. Regardless, once you get familiar with global and project permissions, it will become straight forward to understand and configure issue-level permissions as it takes the same concepts but goes one level deeper.
Jira has some pre-defined global permissions - In this lecture, we will go through each one and understand what each of them mean and walk through what happens when those permissions are not granted.
We spend some time talking about how project roles work and the problems you can solve by using them.
A demo of how you can take advantage of project roles, and how using them can simplify the amount of configuration required in Jira. Taking advantage of project roles is the best way to configure Jira, especially when it comes to project permissions.
This video introduces the elaborate permissions example, by first listing out the objectives and then we list out each of the high-level steps required to achieve the objectives. Both objectives and the solution steps are available in text files as resources associated with the video. Feel free to download the text files and follow along, or better yet, try out the exercise yourself before reviewing the video.
This example walks through the full scenario of having to create users, groups, project roles and assigning the relevant permissions for a project. It basically brings together all the lectures discussed in this section so far. The steps and objectives of the example are to create a sample project and a relevant team, where each team member has different sets of permissions within the project:
The first part of the permissions example implementation - I refer to the text files from the previous video and implement each step one after another. This is where I create the relevant users, groups, project roles and start setting up the permission scheme.
This is part 2 of the example and will focus on creating the project and incorporating the users, project roles and permission scheme that was created for it.
This final part of the example will log in as each of the configured users and ensure that permissions were set up accordingly and working as expected.
Consultant
- Can only see the new project
- Is able to edit and work on issues
- Cannot manage sprints
Project owner:
- Can work on issues
- Can administer the project
- Can manage sprints
Developer
- Is able to see all projects, edit and work on issues (but cannot manage sprints)
Customer
- Can only see this new project
- Cannot edit or work on issues (read-only)
We spend this lecture understanding how the main configurable aspects of Jira (issue types, screens, fields, workflows) are related to each other, and how they all come together when configuring projects. We also introduce the example that we will be covering while going through the next set of lectures.
In this video, we create a new issue type called Spike. Spike tickets are usually created to represent work that involves research or investigation or design. We will then set up the issue type for the example project so Spike issues can be created for that project.
We are going to continue working on the new Spike issue type by creating and configuring screens that will get displayed when creating/editing/viewing a Spike issue. The lecture also shows you how you can assign screens to issue types, and then relate all of that back to our example project.
Now that we've created screens for Spike issues, we will create some custom fields to display on the screens. The lecture also walks through how you can configure various properties of fields and how they behave on screens.
One of the most essential and compelling features of Jira - we will take our first dive at building a workflow from scratch. This workflow will actually be used for Spike issues only and the video shows how you would go about associating workflows with issue types within a given project.
This video takes the default software dev workflow and show you how you can enhance it by including steps for code review and testing by a QA team, as an example. This walkthrough will give you the ability and comfort level to go about editing workflows for your own specific needs, or simply building workflows from scratch.
Part of modifying workflows for software development projects, is to ensure that the agile boards are updated to use the modified workflow statuses and transitions. This video shows you how you can do that.
The last lecture catered to workflows - this video shows you another customizable aspect of workflows, in particular, enabling certain functionality every time an issue transitions from one status to another.
Components are a way to categorize issues within a project. This video shows you how you can create components and configure a default assignee so that any issue created with a particular component can automatically be assigned accordingly.
The last lecture in this elaborate Administration section - we will take a look at some of the other aspects of Jira administration. Unfortunately, there is a lot in there and we aren't able to take a deep dive into all of them, but we will definitely touch on the important ones
Thanks for following along through all prior sections. Hope the course was everything you had hoped for and more :)
This section will be the growing section of the course and will primarily include examples of using Jira for real-world scenarios.
In this video, I show you how I use Jira for my own daily task list, and have been doing so for past few years. My process allows me to maintain a list of things I need to do everyday, track the progress of those tasks, as well as forecast what I can actually accomplish every single day.
This is the second part of how I manage my daily tasklist using Jira. I would be happy to hear feedback, thoughts and/or suggestions on the process.
The icebox contains features that aren't ready to go into the development backlog aka "put on ice". This video shows you various options by which you can manage or create an Icebox in Jira
In the last video, we created a way to manage an Icebox. This adds on to the previous video by showing you how to create a workflow for managing issues within the Icebox. In other words, how to build a completely new workflow to manage the approval of new work or feature requests, before being moved into the development backlog
This example represents a scenario where you've got a backend, frontend and QA team all working on one or more projects, and all managed by a single product owner. The videos shows how you can create agile boards for each team to display only what is relevant to that team.
For the entire course, I used a Jira Cloud instance. And as I described in the first section of the course, there is also the option of Jira Server, where you can install Jira on your own machine. This video has a quick walkthrough of the process of installing Jira on a Windows machine and also demonstrates some firewall settings that you can modify to let other machines within the same network access your Jira instance directly from that machine via IP Address. Since the install process was a bit long, I paused and resumed the video during the relevant points, and so you may notice jumps in the video from one stage to the next.


Excellent detailed course on Jira and Confluence for new users!