What is a Jira project?

Your issue tracker should be the hub of your development project. When properly configured, Jira helps your team members prioritize and organize work better, so they can spend more time developing great software instead of wrangling issues.

A project is simply a collection of issues (stories, bugs, tasks, etc). You would typically use a project to represent the development work for a product, project, or service in Jira.

Scrum, Kanban, or Bug tracking? 

  • Scrum has an iteration-based approach, which is generally a good fit for teams developing products, particularly if your team is releasing new versions on a regular schedule. 

  • Kanban is better suited for a continuous flow of work (e.g. service-oriented teams), where its constraint-based approach helps prevent your team from being overloaded.

  • Bug tracking delivers a basic workflow for tracking new features and bugs.

Team-managed software projects

Our team-managedScrum and Kanban projects are great for teams who are new to agile. Get your team up-and-running with this simplified board-view project template. The set-up is straight-forward and streamlined, delivering more power progressively as you need it. Anyone can create these, while only administrators can create company-managed projects.

Before you begin

You should be a Jira administrator (i.e. someone with the Administer Jira global permission), if you want to set up a new project in Jira (excluding team-managed project templates — unless your Jira admin has implemented a permission scheme in which only admins can create agility projects). Many of the tasks involved can only be performed by a Jira administrator, such as creating a project, modifying a workflow, etc. For more information, see Permissions overview.

The topics in this section cover the activities that you will need to do when configuring a project:

Create a project

Your first task is to create a Software project and configure it according to the needs and requirements of your development team. You need to be a Jira administrator to create a project (excluding team-managed project templates — unless your Jira admin has implemented a permission scheme in which only admins can create agility projects), but you can configure most project details if you are a project administrator.

Learn more: Configuring projects

Configure the board for your project

A board is the central tool for working with issues in a Scrum or Kanban development project. A Scrum or Kanban board will be created when you create a Scrum or Kanban development project respectively. You can add more boards of either type to the project, if you like.

Learn more: Configuring a board

Configure project permissions

You can control access to your project by configuring a permission scheme. A permission scheme maps users, user groups, roles, etc to the project functions (e.g. Assign issues). Your new project will be pre-configured with the default permission scheme.

Learn more: Managing project role memberships

Tweak issue types, workflow, screens, and fields 

Your project is pre-configured with issue types, a workflow, screens, and fields. You can change these to suit any development process. For example, you may want to create a 'Design' issue type or add a 'QA review' step to your workflow.

Learn more: Defining issue type field valuesWorkflowsDefining a screen, Jira custom fields

Create components

Components can be used to group issues in a project. However, in an agile project, you should consider using epics to group issues (stories) instead, as there are more features that support working with epics, like the epic column on boards, reports, etc.

Learn more: Managing components

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