Course: Learn JIRA with Real-World Examples (+Confluence Bonus)

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

A walkthrough of setting up your own JIRA Cloud instance

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.

This lecture touches on how the Kanban methodology works

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

Our first look at projects and navigating within a project

Our first look at the issue navigator screen

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 backlog view of an agile scrum board

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.