JIRA, Scrum, Full Stack: Home

What is JIRA?

JIRA is a software application developed by the Australian software company Atlassian that allows teams to track issues, manage projects, and automate workflows.

JIRA is based on four key concepts: issue, project, board, and workflow.

Issue
An issue is a single work item you track from creation to completion. An issue could be a bug, a user story, an epic, a to-do item for an HR team, or an artifact that your documentation team needs to create.

People may refer to issues as requests, tickets, or tasks. It’s better to use issues or the specific issue types that you define to avoid confusion.

Most product teams typically use issue types of Epic, Story, Bug, Test, and Task.

Projects
A project is a way to group your issues along with the common information and context that tie those issues together. You can configure issues associated with a project in a variety of ways, including visibility restrictions and applicable workflows.

When you use JIRA to support your product development efforts, it’s helpful to have a single project for each product.

Boards
A board in JIRA is a visual representation of your team’s workflow within a project. You can use multiple boards for flexible ways to view, manage, and report on work in progress on the same project.

If you use an agile approach, you may find it helpful to use a Kanban Board view to track backlog items as they refine and a Sprint Board to show the Sprint Backlog for your current sprint.

Workflows
A workflow represents the path that issues take as they progress through your project from creation to completion.

Each label in a workflow, such as To Do, In Progress, and Done, represent a status that an issue can take. You can configure workflows to govern the transitions an issue can take between different statuses and trigger actions that occur when an issue moves into a status.

What is Scrum?
Scrum is an agile way to manage work. Ever few weeks (typically two to four), teams deliver a fully functional chunk of work (an increment). Teams and the business use the feedback from each delivery to determine what to build next, or how to adapt what they've already built.

Put very simply, Scrum works through a series of events that happen over a defined period of time: that time period is called a sprint. Sprints are short timeboxes during which the team turns ideas into working product. The events then repeat every sprint.

A typical team has between five and nine people, but projects can easily scale into hundreds of people divided among many teams. Individuals may join the team with various job titles; those titles are insignificant. Each person contributes in whatever way they can to complete the work of each sprint.

Development teams are supported by two specific roles. The first is a Scrum Master, who can be thought of as a coach for the team. Scrum Masters help team members use the process to perform at their highest level, and remove impediments to progress.

While the ScrumMaster focuses on helping the team be the best that it can be, the product owner works to direct the team to the right goal. The product owner is the project’s key stakeholder and represents users, customers and others in the process. Because of this, many product owners come from product management or marketing. Product owners guide the team toward building the right product.

What is Full Stack Development?
Full Stack Development encompasses the complete process of application software development, including both the front-end and back-end development. The front end consists of the user interface (or UI), and the back end handles the business logic and application workflows that run behind the scenes.

Full Stack developers possess the skills and knowledge to work across the entire technology stack, enabling seamless user experiences and developing robust backends.

The Front End: Crafting engaging user interfaces
The front end is the face of a web application, the part that users interact with directly. Full stack web developers possess a deep understanding of front-end technologies, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They leverage these foundational languages to structure, style, and enhance the visual appeal of web pages.

Full Stack developers also stay current with the ever-evolving front-end landscape, constantly exploring and mastering the latest technologies and frameworks. Whether it's harnessing the power of React to build dynamic and interactive user interfaces, leveraging Angular's robust features for complex web applications, or embracing the simplicity and flexibility of Vue.js, full stack web developers are well-versed in a wide range of tools.

The Back End: Powering the application's core

Full Stack developers are proficient in server-side languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript, allowing them to build robust and scalable back-end systems. Back-end developers play a crucial role in designing and implementing the application's core functionality, handling data management, and ensuring smooth integration with databases like MySQL, MongoDB, or PostgreSQL.

Additionally, they possess the skills to write clean, efficient, and maintainable code that powers the application's back-end logic. Whether it's Python's simplicity and versatility, Ruby's elegance and readability, PHP's widespread adoption, or Node.js's event-driven architecture, full stack developers are well-versed in multiple programming languages and can choose the best fit for the project at hand.

Full Stack Developers: An increasingly important role
As the complexity of web applications grows, the role of back-end developers becomes increasingly important.

Full stack developers who excel across the stack are highly sought after by companies in many industries. They bring a comprehensive understanding of the entire web development stack, from the front end to the back end, and can drive the development of robust, scalable, and efficient applications.