Jira Software Essentials: Mastering JQL Filters & Dashboards

In this section, we'll lay the foundation for the rest of the course. By setting up a new project and importing the sample data, you'll be working with the same data set that the course uses enabling you to get the most out of every lesson. We'll be creating a fictitious product project for a copywriting application that uses artificial intelligence to generate content for copywriters, content marketers and storytellers (like Mad-Libs if you've ever played that game). We'll call it: "AwesomeCopy" :)

If you don't already have one, sign up for a free Jira Software Cloud account so that you can easily follow the rest of the course.

In order to best follow along with the rest of the course, you'll need to create a brand new Jira Cloud Company-Managed project (or Classic if you're using an older on-premise version hosted at your workplace).

In this lesson, we'll setup our required fields for issues. By having this, your Jira project's issue data will ensure that the fields necessary for reporting are filled out so that you don't have any data loss in your JQL filters and reports.

Since we'll be using the component field, you'll need to create the related components in your new project so that the import process will succeed without errors.

Now that our project has been created along with required fields, we need some data to play with. In this lesson, we'll import some bug issues that we'll use to build out our JQL filters and dashboard later in the course.

*** Make sure to DOWNLOAD the list of issues to import into your project by downloading the "JQL-Course-Import-Issues.csv" file in the RESOURCES folder for this lesson. ***

While limited, basic search is really quite extensive out-of-the-box. Learn how to use the basic filtering within Jira.

With JQL, discover how to get creative with your filters, such as advanced date field searches and combinations using AND and OR statements. Don't worry, Jira has an auto-complete for the search function so you're good to go!

In this lesson, you'll learn the key concepts that make up a great search filter. Using concepts such as DRY ("Don't Repeat Yourself") from software development as well as leveraging auto-complete to help you build queries faster, you'll master what it takes to write effective clean JQL from scratch. Additionally, by taking a user-centric design centered approach toward filtering issues will help you create better filters that will power your reporting efforts and enable teams to make better decisions.

Give your filter a simple yet descriptive name you won't forget so you can easily identify which results it is returning. This is especially important if you want to reuse it as a function of another JQL filter.

After saving your Jira filter, make sure to set the permissions so that other users can view it. If not, it's likely they will not see any cool dashboard gadgets or embedded reports you use in tools like Confluence.

Email is still used quite a lot in many organizations. Set up automated email subscriptions for your filters and say goodbye to sending manual emails!

There are endless ways you might want to surface project data. Before building a bug dashboard to show the defects for a project so that teams can view and track progress to improve their software, we'll need to create some saved filters.

Let's create our first JQL filter to find all bug issue types that are in the open status. This will be used in the next section as the source filter for our PIE Chart & filter results gadgets in our Bug dashboard.

Overview of gadgets and setup a 2 column layout dashboard

In this lesson, we'll add a PIE Chart gadget to our dashboard that includes bugs for all components. This will help show the distribution across each component to identify potential trends that we might want to dig deeper on determining the root cause to prevent future defects.

In this lesson, we'll add a Filter Results Chart gadget to our dashboard that includes bugs for all components.

Thank you for completing the course! In this bonus lecture, I share a personal story about how building automation and AI skills on top of the Jira/Agile foundation changed my career — and a supplemental resource to help you explore the same path.

Playbook available at https://agiletactix.ai/blueprint?utm_source=udemy&utm_medium=bonus-lecture (email signup required).