Your Go-To Jira Glossary

45 comments

It would be great if this glossary could be expanded. Project is a core element of Jira. It is not included. List View vs. Detailed View have different functionalities. They are not defined. Labels have a unique definition in Jira. It is not included. There are so many important terms that are Jira specific and yet the list above is very short.

@valids is the Lead Time different from the Cycle Time on the glossary?

@timothy odusami, Lead Time is different from Cycle Time as it starts when a request is created and ends at delivery. Cycle Time starts when the actual work starts.

@Walter Buggenhout nice graphic.

Please add the term Roadmap

I wish there was a glossary for the Jira icons too.

Great!

A picture is worth a thousand words @Walter Buggenhout ! Extremely helpful for new users.

Great article and thanks for the image too @Walter Buggenhout ...

I think it would also be a great idea to break down some of the schemes in layman's terms as well (permissions, screens, etc)

This is a nice resource but it needs to be 'living' and built on frequently I believe.

Thanks again

Great information 👍

Outstanding. Thanks Katie!!

As a new user, this is very useful - although I don't understand why Jira doesn't use AGILE terminology? For example Issue = Tasks, Backlog = User Story??

@Yasser Al Kindi - it does use Agile terminology, but the software is an issue tracker, it was built for more than just Agile.

If you use Scrum or Kanban Agile methodologies, then you'll find the default terminology there is agile - for example a standard default scrum project will have issue types of Story, Bug, and Task (at the issue level), Epic for Epics (although Scaled Agile term there would be "feature") and sub-tasks (not that Scrum mentions them much).

Backlog is the term used for the backlog - the collection of stories, bugs and tasks that need some attention and you've not started on them yet. Backlog is a totally different thing to a Story.

But as an issue tracker, it's highly customisable, you can use whatever terminology you like in a lot of places.

Like • Yasser Al Kindi likes this

Is there a more technical Jira glossary? One that would include 'scheme', 'screen' etc.

Like • Yatish Madhav likes this

@Gustavo_Grillo - for the more technical concepts, a glossary would most likely not be very helpful, since it's not really possible to put into a short definition what these concepts are.

However, Atlassian (online) documentation is usually quite good when it comes to describing what these technical concepts are and how they work. just a quick online search on the keywords you mentioned above quickly pops up this example on projects, screens, schemes and fields.

You could use the tool itself as your glossary (or as the guide of things you may want to search for to learn more). Just 2 quick examples:

if you navigate to Jira Settings > Issues as a Jira Administrator, on the left hand side you will see a list of every single part of the project configuration that is managed centrally: issue types and issue type schemes | screens, screen schemes and issue type screen schemes | workflows and workflow schemes | custom fields, Field configurations and Field configuration schemes | ...
When you open a project, navigate to Project Settings > Summary, you will see a clear overview of all the items that form the project configuration.

In both cases, starting from the items you see in the overview pages in the tool you can easily find your way to detailed manuals. And - good thing - the glossary (if you can call it that way) never gets outdated 😀