New to Jira - migrating from Monday.com

[Shona Brown]

We are currently using Monday.com for bug tracking/tickets/software dev however are wanting to move to Atlassian/Jira. Also use Trello for test tracking.

I've chatted with the Support team, watched several tutorials online etc, but feel I could do with some further help/advice on how to best setup Jira.

Our business is quite unique in that we have a small in-house team of developers, one main tester (me), and also ~25 internal staff running a helpdesk for external 'clients'.

What has drawn us to Jira is the cleaner layout and the ability to monitor SLAs, along with using Confluence for a staff intranet (which could also do with some enlightenment/ideas/use case examples of!)

Currently I have setup a Jira Software Space for our dev team, and created 4 epics for some ongoing projects we have running. Within those epics I was planning on breaking the project down to tasks and then sub-tasks. An example of one of our ongoing projects is upgrading the Drupal version on our website - so the entirety of the site needs testing, including every function. I've done a Trello board for a similar project on a different website upgrade, and would very much like to use Trello again for tracking my progress of testing, then reporting bugs in Jira. The downside is I have a lot of the tracking checklists etc laid out on Monday.com from previous, so if there also was a quick way to import it to Trello I'm open ears!!

[Artem Taranenko]

Your question is a bit vague, but you've mentioned several use cases and potential activities, so I'll try to speak to each one of them.

Helpdesk via JSM

Jira Service Management is the appropriate product for an external help desk. First and foremost it is due to licensing and user experience. Your clients would be set up as 'Customers' and be able to submit issues via a Customer Support Portal without having to consume a license. Support items would then be assigned to 'agents' which are essentially licensed users that do provide support. If the support item requires development, there are automations and workflows you can set up to copy the service request into Jira where your development team can pick it up. What happens inside Jira will be invisible to the customer, but there are a couple of options to sync information back to the original item in JSM from Jira. Another benefit of JSM is its integration with Confluence and sharing of knowledge base support articles with external clients. SLAs are available in JSM as a default feature. There are some agentic AI capabilities too, but the basics are what I've outlined.

Confluence

Confluence is a wiki-style knowledge management tool which teams can use to capture various information for both internal and external consumption. Your internal processes, policies, documentation, release notes and pretty much any piece of content can go into Confluence. As described above, you can also expose support articles via JSM's Customer Support portals, or create public and anonymous access spaces (for things like release notes or client-facing policies for example).

Development and QA in Jira:
Your development can be tracked in Jira, and is best done along with your CI/CD integrations. Jira gives you the flexibility to set up any work type, but if you are adhering to a traditional Agile methodology, your basic set of work types could be Epic, Story, Bug. Epics consist of Stories. Bugs relate to a Story.

Tasks can represent development-adjacent work such as configuration, change management, etc

Your workflow should represent your SDLC, so for a Story and Bug it could be something like:
Backlog > In Progress > Code Review > Ready for QA > Testing > Done.

You could configure this workflow to generate a sub-task issue type (doesn't have to be called 'sub-task' but act as a sub-task to a parent type) when workflow reaches Ready for QA. If you want to get fancy, you could have Rovo read the story and generate a list of test cases based on the content of the Story. Transition to Done can be conditional on all sub-tasks being completed, which would prevent manual transition of Stories whose testing has not actually been finished (based on subtasks).

Generally, Jira workflow and automations are very powerful and there is lots you can do with workflows and automations. Some of it will require a deeper dive into what you do or how you want to do it.

Feel free to post any follow-up questions or reach out directly if you're looking to connect.