JIRA User Ninja Training

JIRA Ninja Guide

Sharpen your shuriken and shrink into the shadows as you begin your ninja training. Read closely, as the ancient art of the JIRA ninja is imparted to you. If you make it through training, you will be rewarded with the JIRA black belt and title of JIRA Master!

This guide is intended for all JIRA users. If you are an admin, check out the Admin Ninja guide. If your team uses GreenHopper, check out the Agile Ninja guide.

To receive your White Belt, you must first learn how to:

  • Edit Issues
  • Run Pre-Built Filters
  • Use the Quick Search Box
  • Add Labels to your Issues

Edit Issues

There are two ways to edit issues in JIRA: with the edit dialog or with inline edit. The edit dialog gives you access to all fields, but inline edit is a faster way to edit issues.

How to do it:

  1. Click the 'Edit' button or press 'e' to bring up the edit dialog. Edit the desired fields, then click 'Update'.
  2. To edit an issue without the edit dialog, just click on the field you want to edit. You can also select a field to edit by pressing ',' and typing the name of the field.
Inline Edit

To see all of the keyboard shortcuts available to you, press '?' or check out the documentation. Click here for more info on editing issues.

Run Pre-Built Filters

Once you've gotten some issues in your JIRA instance, you can start to use issue filters to find and organise them. Before you start creating your own filters, check out some of these pre-built ones to get started.

How to do it

  1. Open the 'Projects' dropdown menu in the main nav.
  2. Select the project containing the issues you'd like to filter.
  3. Open the 'Filters' dropdown menu near the top-right of the screen.
  4. Select a filter to run.

Note: Once the filter has run, you can click the 'Edit' tab to see how it was composed.

The Quick Search box, available at the top-right corner of every screen in JIRA, is a powerful tool to quickly track down issues. 

How to do it:

  1. Type '/' to place your cursor in the box, so you can immediately start typing.
  2. To find issues with a specific word in the summary, description, or comments, just type the word in the box and press enter.
  3. Try out some complex queries. For example, 'r:dcook ANG unresolved' finds all unresolved issues reported by dcook in the ANG project.

See the documentation for more detailed instructions on how to use Quick Search.

Check out this video to see some of the powerful quick search features.

Add Labels to your Issues

Labels offer a flexible way to categorise and track groups of issues, regardless of which project they're in. Issues can have as many labels as you'd like, so you can group them together in infinitely many ways!

How to do it

  1. Navigate to the issue you'd like to label.
  2. With keyboard shortcuts enabled, press 'L.'
    • You can also add a label by clicking the pencil icon next to the 'Labels' field in the issue's details section.
  3. Add a label by either selecting one from the drop-down menu, or by starting to type its name and selecting it from the suggested labels. If a label is not found that matches your input, you may create a new one by typing its name and pressing 'Return.'
  4. Add as many labels as you'd like. When you're done, press 'Return' or click the 'Update' button to apply the labels to the issue.

Click a label in the issue's 'Labels' field to search for all issues with that label.

Check out the docs for more info on labels.