Most people thought it would be best to start this journey with the Jira Fundamentals Learning Path. This would give me the basics of the software, introduce common used terminology and should make it easier to complete the paths up ahead.
Without much delay, I set upon this task. Since I followed this path before on a different account, I felt confident that I should breeze through this.
So, without further ado, how did it go?
Course
The course is well structured and starts at the absolute beginner level. It assumes that you are a user of the product, wont be administering and have a Jira instance available in which you can practice.
While I cannot encourage testing in a production environment (really, please don’t), the tasks in this course won’t interfere with the working of the instance. Just make sure you either improve upon them or delete them after you are done.
If you don’t have an instance, or would like to explore the product more than is possible as a user, I highly encourage you to start a free instance. Just go to https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/free and sign up. The free version supports up to 10 users, plenty to experiment all you want.
While the course does introduce recent changes, it isn’t fully up-to-date. For instance, the course mentions Insights instead of the new name, Assets.
However, it does introduce the products Jira Work Management and Jira Align. As to be expected in a fundamentals course, you won’t get much information about those products. Especially Jira Align, remains very vague.
Focus points
The course heavily focusses on team work, being more efficient in both your work and personal life, and to make using Jira a daily habit. This focus does imply that you should use Jira for more than just work. Since Jira is, at the base, a very advanced To-Do list, this isn’t that strange. It just makes me wonder how this combines with the Work - Life theme of late and how, without suggesting that you create a personal instance, you should handle this within your work environment.
Being a fundamentals course, they focus on all the basics. You get a good explanation about Jira, issues and boards. It also gives a basic rundown of Agile and explains the differences between Kanban and Scrum. There is a handy link to more information about Agile (https://www.atlassian.com/agile) if you are interested.
Best practices
After getting the basic information, there are a few best practices that Atlassian encourages you to use.
For your convenience:
- Write short and clear summaries of around 4-7 words
- Tasks: “<Action> <Activity/Thing>”
- Stories: “As a <Persona>, I want <Thing>”
- Bugs: “<Feature> should do <X>, but does <Y>”
- Create multiple issues from the backlog or roadmap view
- Flag issues to indicate something is up with the issue
- Use e-mail notifications to stay connected
- Stay as all-inclusive as you can manage
- Set up an e-mail filter to label and categorize e-mails in your mail client
- Use comments for everything. Requests, updates, questions etc.
- Change your personal settings
- Change your Jira Homepage to “Your Work”
- Use the board as your default view
- Use a filter to see only issues relevant to you
- Create custom filters by saving searches.
- Create Dashboards to get a customized view
- Use gadgets to get the information you need
Exam
After you have gone through all the information, you need to pass an exam to receive the Jira Fundamentals badge. You will need to get 80% on a 30 question exam to pass.
Most question are very straightforward but there are some question that aren’t addressed in the course and will need to be learned by experimenting.
In the end I passed with 93% and received my badge.
Link to certification
Conclusion
This was fun and I can highly recommend going through this course again if it has been a while.
To my own surprise, I still learned a few things from this.
- The Jira name refers to the whole Atlassian family of products, not just Jira Software.
- I didn’t hear of Jira Align before. Curious to find out more.
Some recommendations for taking this path
- Get a free Jira instance if you haven’t already
- Practice what is taught and experiment on your own
- Have fun, it is a free, entry level path without
What’s next?
This was more fun than I expected and I am looking forward to continuing this journey. I am still not sure which path to take next. It will be either Jira Service Management Fundamentals or Trello Fundamentals. I use JSM on a daily basis but I have no experience with Trello.
Just stay tuned, I hope to post a new article before the week is over.
Happy learning!
Paul
