How to use Jira: a beginner's guide

The short answer

Jira is where a team keeps its work. Each piece of work is a ticket, and the tickets sit in columns on a board that show where each one is. Day to day, most people do five things in Jira: read tickets, read the board, move their own tickets when they start or finish something, comment on tickets, and create new ones. You can learn all five in an afternoon. The rest is the way your team uses them.

The sections below take those five things one at a time, then cover sprints and backlogs, the two words that confuse beginners most.

The words you will see first

Jira has changed some of its own words recently, so you may hear two names for the same thing:

• Ticket, issue or work item. One piece of work. People have called these "issues" or "tickets" for years. In October 2024 Atlassian started replacing "issue" with "work" as the default name, and its current Jira Cloud help pages say work item. Many teams still say issue or ticket.
• Space or project. The container a team's work lives in. Atlassian's current Jira Cloud help pages call it a space; older pages and many colleagues still say project.
• Board. A view of the work in columns. One column per status, or per group of statuses.
• Status. Where a ticket is right now, such as To Do, In Progress or Done.
• Assignee and reporter. The assignee does the work. The reporter created the ticket.

This guide says "ticket" because that is what most people say out loud.

Step 1: Read a ticket

Open any ticket and find these parts. They are on every ticket, whatever your team's setup.

1. The key, such as PAY-142. The letters belong to the space and the number counts up. When someone says "can you check 142?", this is what they mean.
2. The summary, the one-line title. It is also what you see on the board.
3. The status, the coloured button that says where the work is.
4. The assignee and reporter. Ask the assignee for progress; ask the reporter what they meant.
5. The priority, which tells the team what to pick up first.
6. The description and comments. Read the newest comments first. They often answer your question before you ask it.

Step 2: Read the board

A board turns all those tickets into columns. Work moves from left to right. Every status in Jira belongs to one of three status categories, and they are a good mental model for any board, however many columns it has:

Two habits help on a crowded board. Filter it to one person (the round avatars above the board) to see only their work. And look for flagged tickets, which teams use to show that something is stuck; the latest comment usually says what it is waiting for.

Step 3: Move your work

Moving tickets is how the team knows what is happening without asking you. When you start something, move its card to In Progress. When you finish, move it to the next column your team uses, often a review or testing column before Done. You can drag the card on the board or change the status button inside the ticket; both do the same thing.

Add a short comment when you move something: what you did and what happens next. "Fix is merged, Ana is testing it today" saves a round of "any update?" messages.

Step 4: Create a ticket

A good ticket lets someone who was not in the conversation do the work. Before you click Create, pick the type. Atlassian's default work types are:

• Story: something new that users need. Atlassian calls it the smallest unit of work that needs to be done.
• Task: work that needs to be done and is neither of the others.
• Bug: a problem that stops the product from working as it should.
• Epic: a large piece of work that groups stories, tasks and bugs (see what an epic is).

Then write a summary that makes sense on its own, a description with the facts someone else needs, and an honest priority. For a bug, say what happened, how to make it happen again, and what should have happened instead. If you are unsure which type to choose, the story, task or bug guide has a quick test.

Step 5: Find things

When someone mentions a ticket by key, type the key into the search box and you go straight to it. When you only remember the topic, search by words: everything with "statement" in the summary, for example. Most of the time those two searches are all you need. Jira also has a query language for advanced searches, which you can learn later.

Sprints and backlogs in one minute

Many software teams work in sprints. The Scrum Guide describes a sprint as a fixed-length event of one month or less, and each team decides its own length. At the start of a sprint the team picks the work it will do, and the board shows that work.

Everything not in the current sprint waits in the backlog, which the Scrum Guide describes as an ordered list of what is needed to improve the product. Order matters: the top of the backlog is what the team expects to pick up next.

Not every team uses sprints. Kanban teams keep a continuous flow on one board without fixed sprint lengths. The five skills above work the same way on both.

Practise before it counts

Reading about Jira only goes so far. The quickest way to get comfortable is to do these steps on a board where nothing you click can cause a problem. Agile Board Practice is built for exactly that: short lessons on a practice board where you open tickets, move cards between columns and create stories and bugs, and every step tells you whether you got it right and why.