🔵 JIRA Handbook

Overview

JIRA (by Atlassian) is the most widely used project tracking and issue management tool in software development. It supports Scrum boards, Kanban boards, bug tracking, and roadmaps.

Vendor Atlassian  Editions JIRA Software, JIRA Service Mgmt  Integrates Confluence, Bitbucket, GitHub

Core Concepts

Issue Types

• Epic — large body of work broken into stories
• Story (User Story) — feature from end-user perspective
• Task — a work item (technical or non-technical)
• Sub-task — smaller piece of a Story/Task
• Bug — defect to be fixed
• Spike — research/investigation task

Issue Fields

• Summary, Description, Assignee, Reporter
• Priority: Highest, High, Medium, Low, Lowest
• Story Points (estimation)
• Sprint, Fix Version, Labels, Components
• Acceptance Criteria (custom field)

Scrum Board in JIRA

• Backlog — all items not yet in a Sprint
• Active Sprint — current Sprint board (To Do → In Progress → Done)
• Sprint Planning — drag items from Backlog to Sprint
• Burndown Chart — tracks remaining story points per day
• Velocity Chart — average story points per Sprint
• Release / Version — group of issues for a release

JQL – JIRA Query Language

Query Example	Purpose
project = "PROJ" AND status = "In Progress"	Active work in a project
assignee = currentUser()	My issues
sprint in openSprints()	Current Sprint items
priority = High AND status != Done	High priority open issues
created >= -7d	Issues created in last 7 days

Common Interview Topics

• JIRA Scrum vs Kanban board differences
• How to configure workflows and transitions
• Epics vs Stories vs Tasks hierarchy
• JIRA permissions and roles (Admin, Developer, Viewer)
• Integrating JIRA with GitHub/Bitbucket
• Using JIRA for bug triage and sprint ceremonies