What is a Jira project?

Your work item tracker should be the hub of your development space. 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 work items.

A space is simply a collection of work items (stories, bugs, tasks, etc). You would typically use a space 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 spaces

Our team-managedScrum and Kanban spaces 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 spaces.

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 space in Jira (excluding team-managed space templates — unless your Jira admin has implemented a permission scheme in which only admins can create agility spaces). Many of the tasks involved can only be performed by a Jira administrator, such as creating a space, 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 space:

Create a space

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

Find out more: Configuring spaces

Configure the board for your space

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

Find out more: Configuring a board

Configure space permissions

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

Learn more: Managing space role memberships

Tweak work types, workflow, screens, and fields 

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

Find out more: Defining work type field values, Workflows, Defining a screen, Jira custom fields

Create components

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

Find out more: Managing components