Start navigating Jira

10 min
Beginner

By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:

  • Define and identify work items, projects, and boards in Jira
  • Navigate the top navigation and sidebar
  • Switch between different projects and boards
  • Find information when viewing a work item

Explore work items, projects, and boards

What’s a work item?

In Jira, individual pieces of work are work items. You'll update work items to show work progress or add relevant information, like notes from a meeting or a question for a teammate.
A software development team might have a work items that looks like this
A Jira issue card says Fix button reload error on home screen. The card also has information about the assignee, priority, labels, and a unique id number.
A legal team might have a work item that looks like this
A Jira issue card says Review and edit the contract. The card also has information about the assignee, priority, labels, and a unique id number.
A marketing team might have a work item that looks like this
A Jira issue card says Launch web advertising assets. The card also has information about the assignee, priority, labels, and a unique id number.
Work items can vary in size depending on how your team uses them. Some work items take months to complete. Others finish in a few hours. Like most things in Jira, you can use work items however works best for your team.
What’s a project?
A project is a collection of related work items. In Jira, every work item belongs to a project.
Teams can use projects differently depending on how they want to categorize and organize work.
👉 For example: You can use a project to track all of the work for a team. Your project might be "Game Design Team," "Marketing Team," or "Legal Team."
👉 Another example: You can use a project to track a larger deliverable, like an app version release or large marketing effort. Your project might be "Vidzi App Release V2.7" or "Fall Marketing Campaign."
To see all of your projects, select Projects from the sidebar. This will show you a list of starred and recent projects. Select View all projects to see all of the projects on your site. When you’re working in a project, you can see its name in the upper left.
This shows the name of the current project.
Screenshot of a Jira kanban board. The project name is highlighted.
Use the Projects menu to view starred and recent projects.
Screenshot of a Jira kanban board. The Project link has been selected in the top navigation bar and a drop-down menu of recent projects is highlighted.
Project keys are short versions of the project name that identify the work items in that project.
👉 For example: If the project key for your Game Design Team project is GDT, work items within that project will be GDT-1, GDT-2, and so on.

What’s a board?

A board is a visualization of the work in a project. Boards have columns with work items in them. The columns represent the statuses that your work, represented by work items, moves through. Your entire board represents your team’s workflow, the path of statuses an work items moves through.
👉 For example: Kate’s team uses the marketing team board to track their work. Their work moves through three statuses, To Do, In Progress, and Done. Their board has three columns, one for each status. When Kate starts working on a work item, she moves it from the To Do column to the In Progress column.
👇In this example, the work item card "Customer research" moves through the workflow: To Do to In Progress to Done.
Boards belong to projects. A single Jira project can have several boards, depending on its configuration.
👉 For example: The Legal department has three boards in their project: Contracts Team, Acquisitions Team, and Patents Team. Each board tracks work for a different team within their department.
👉 Another example: Lei’s team has multiple boards within the Game Design Team project. Their boards show work related to the games they're working on: Farm Harvest, Galaxy Action II, and Street Car Racer.
There are two types of boards in Jira. Kanban boards support a continuous flow of work. Work items move in and out of the board from the start of the project until the end of the project. Scrum boards track groups of work items that the team completes during a fixed period of time, often a two-week "sprint." After a sprint completes, the team creates a new sprint for the next group of work items they want to work on.
This is a kanban board.
Screenshot of a Jira kanban board. The center of the board and the Kanban link in the left navigation are highlighted.
This is a scrum board.
Screenshot of a Jira scrum board. The center of the board and the Active Sprints button in the left navigation panel are highlighted.
To find your projects, boards, and work items, and to see other teams' work, you’ll need to know how to move around Jira.
👇Click the icons below to learn how to find what you need in Jira.
Screenshot of a Jira board. Indicators are pointing to each of the navigation elements in the top navigation panel.

The options in your navigation bars may look different. Navigation bars depend on your site settings and team preferences.

The sidebar is the main way to find information in Jira, so let's explore it.
👇Click the icons below to learn how to find what you need in Jira
A Jira board. The left navigation panel is highlighted and there are lines pointing to the links of the navigation panel.

You might not see some of the features in this example project in your Jira site.

Within your project, you'll see the board view and the project toolbar.
👇Click the icons below to learn how to find what you need in the project toolbar.
A Jira board. The project toolbar is highlighted and there are lines pointing to the links within the toolbar.
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