Onboarding New Jira Users with Glass Project Documentation - On-premise

Features of Glass Project Documentation you can try this demo

Getting to know the terminology of Jira
Overview of basic project configurations
Understand who else is in the project in relation to permissions
Understand your own permissions
Analyze the behavior of issue types of the project, including workflow and screens
Explore workflows and understand the power of workflow actions

Detailed Description

There are many situations in your life when you have to learn something new. It can be especially stressful if that occurs on your first day in your new job. Jira is a great tool to work with, however, configuration details can vary project by project. No matter if you have former experience with Jira, a new project remains unknown to you until someone tells you the details.

In this scenario, you are a newcomer at BigTech LLC, and you met Jira for the first time on your first day. Luckily, BigTech is an enlightened company that cares about its workers and purchased Glass Project Documentation for their Jira instance. Also, they granted the View Glass Documentation permission to all logged-in users, so every project you can access has an extension called Glass Documentation, which will help you understand the basics of Jira, and unveil the details of the project configuration.

At first, you have to catch up with the terminology of Jira and understand its concepts. There you have the Glass Introduction menu for that.

Using your new knowledge you can browse project settings, check your and other user permissions, and many more.

In the end, you will understand what is a workflow, and why workflows are essential parts of Jira and your company!

1. Open Glass and learn about Schemes

Problem: You are not familiar with Jira but you want to use it for your daily work

How to solve it in theory: Open Glass Documentation and read through the Glass Introduction menu

Steps to carry out: Go to your project and open Glass Documentation on the left project sidebar.

username: testagent
password: metademoagent

A page will show up with details about your Jira project. To be able to understand all this information, you need to be familiar with the basics of Jira. Open the Glass Introduction menu on the top right corner, and read through briefly about any topics you may find interesting.

Note that Glass information cards are color-coded, as described in the General section.

Now that you are familiar with the basics of Jira, let's have a look at the schemes, workflow, people, and permission overview sections. If you would like to read more, you can find links to the official documentation on every page.

2. Other People in the project

Problem: You would like to know who else is working on this project

How to solve in theory: Check the dashboard, then open the People tab for further details

Steps to carry out: First, you can check the number of people added to this project in the Glass Overview area.

Now, open the People tab on the top, and have a look at your coworkers involved in the project. Here you can see that people can be added directly and via groups to projects. Sometimes both. Groups usually contain many people. With Glass, you can browse and search group members as well! Just click on the group to see its members.

To sum this up, there are 7 people working on this project, two of them are added directly, and the rest have access to the project via user groups.

3. Permissions and Project roles

Problem: Who can do what?

How to solve in theory: Open the People tab and check Project Roles, then open the Permissions tab

Steps to carry out: In the People tab, users are grouped by so-called "Project Roles". Project Roles are virtual groups of people, which are widely used in Jira to manage permissions (as you already learned from the Glass Introduction menu!). Navigate to the Permission tab, and check the Permission Matrix. Here all the available permissions are listed as rows, while permission groups (we call them Actors) are assigned to different permissions. This view is a better visualization compared to the native Permission scheme of the project.

Let's answer some questions:

Who can Delete Issues?
Project Role: Administrators; People who are added to the Administrator project role on the People tab
Can you edit Sprints?
As no one has that permission, you can't unfortunately
Can Balázs Szakál Create Issues?
The Create Issues permission is granted to Project Role: Administrators as well. Check if Balázs Szakál is a member of the Administrators role on the People tab. Yes, he is added directly and via group as well

4. Check the Issue Types (including Workflows)

Problem: How do issues behave in the project?

How to solve in theory: Open the Issue type tab

Steps: To overview Issue types, go to the General tab, and check the Schemes section. As for now, you already know that there are schemes in Jira, and schemes describe the behavior of Issue types in the project. We can identify that these four Issue Types have some similarities when it comes to Workflow and Screen configurations, but they have many differences as well.

Let's now deep dive into the Story issue type. Open the Issue Types tab and select Story. The workflow assigned to this issue type is shown and also, workflow transitions are listed here.

Now, let's have a look at this particular workflow! You can quickly see that there are several custom workflow actions (numbers highlighted in blue in the transition table). Let's see what happens when the Resolved transition is executed.

This transition is reused, so it can be triggered from two different issue statuses, but points to the same destination status. It has a transition screen with several input fields which will pop up during the transition, and also a custom post function will be executed. Custom workflow actions are marked with blue color, the other ones are system defaults which usually do not change.

Don't ever be surprised again, if the Assignee is suddenly changed when you execute this transition!