Publisher s note: A new sixth edition, updated with enhanced Jira 8.21 and Data Center features has now been published.Key Features: - Work on agile projects in Jira from both the administrator and end user's perspective - Explore the improved Scrum and Kanban board and backlog - Work through exercises at the end of each chapter to reinforce your skills Book Description: Atlassian Jira enables effective bug tracking for your software and mobile applications and provides tools to track and manage tasks for your projects. Jira Essentials is a comprehensive guide, now updated to Jira 8 to include enhanced features such as updates to Scrum and Kanban UI, additional search capabilities, and changes to Jira Service Desk.The book starts by explaining how to plan and set up a new Jira 8 instance from scratch before getting you acquainted with key features such as emails, workflows, business processes, and much more. You'll then understand Jira's data hierarchy and how to design and work with projects.Since Jira is used for issue management, this book delves into the different issues that can arise in your projects. You'll explore fields, including custom fields, and learn to use them for more effective data collection. You'll create new screens from scratch and customize them to suit your requirements. The book also covers workflows and business processes, and guides you in setting up incoming and outgoing mail servers. Toward the end, you'll study Jira's security model and Jira Service Desk, which allows you to run Jira as a support portal.By the end of this Jira book, you will be able to implement Jira 8 in your projects with ease. What You Will Learn: - Understand Jira s data hierarchy and how to design and work with projects in Jira - Use Jira for agile software projects, business process management, customer service support, and more - Understand issues and work with them - Design both system and custom fields to behave differently under different contexts - Create and design your own screens and apply them to different project and issue types - Gain an understanding of the workflow and its various components - Set up both incoming and outgoing mail servers to work with e-mails Who this book is for: This book will be especially useful for project managers but it's also intended for other Jira users, including developers, and any other industry besides software development, who would like to leverage Jira's powerful task management and workflow features to better manage their business processes.