Most people look at JIRA as an issue and project tracking tool, but it does much more. You can program JIRA to perform many tasks that help resolve issues and reduce stalled tickets. There are also add-ons available for download that help customize JIRA’s functionality and appearance. Also, with the help of JIRA, you can streamline your issue tracking system, thus helping reduce the time it takes to get an issue resolved.

JIRA Helps Resolve Issues and Reduce Stalled Tickets
Resolving help desk tickets is one of the many tasks that a business must face every day and JIRA can make that process smoother and more effective. Not only does JIRA improve the way tickets are handled, but it also minimizes the time it takes to resolve a ticket.

Here are just a few cool things JIRA can do to help make resolving issues much more efficient:

• Provides reports that show how much work each user is given and how long the work will take to complete, through User Workload Reports.
• Provides charts to show work load assignments for each particular project or issue (whichever you program), through Workload Charts.
• Provides reports as to how long it takes for issues to be resolved, through Resolution Time Reports.
• Provides reports to show how much work is remaining before a version is completed, through Version Workload Reports.
• Provides reports to show how many days have passed while the issue has gone unresolved, through Average Age Reports.

• Creates customized dashboards that testing managers, at all levels, can use to quickly evaluate a project health- is in trouble or going to be in trouble?

JIRA Enables Add-Ons
JIRA enables add-ons that are used to help track time and to view projects from within your work calendar. One popular add-on for JIRA is the JIRA Enhancer add-on. This add-on calculates response time and lapse time. It also calculates the issue's first and last close, as well as user date close and user resolution date, as well as resolution user and commenter notes. See more JIRA add-ons here.

Streamline Issue Resolving
Business often fall victim to not managing project issues, which costs time and money: two things businesses can’t afford to splurge on. When streamlining issue management, you can expect to reduce the time it takes to get issues resolved. This means your product will go out faster, allowing you to start your next project sooner.
Resolving an issue/ticket is always more productive when you’re able to have access to every step of resolving the issue from one place. Issue resolution works better when you’re able to see all of the commenter notes without having to explore the software. For the simplicity of the process, JIRA’s dashboard is completely customizable allowing you to add and reposition gadgets and easily change the layout. It also allows you to change the look of each gadget.

There are several available gadgets for your dashboard, for example:

• Assign to me - Displays open issues and projects assigned to the user
• Bamboo plan - Displays a list of plans on the bamboo server as well as the status of each plan

• Project - Provides information in filters related to specified projects

To be honest there are way too many cool things that JIRA can do, and far too many to list. You just need to explore JIRA in its entirety to understand the functionality and capabilities. While exploring JIRA, try some of the gadgets -- they will enhance your dashboard experience. You’ll have a more streamline process and you’ll be able to resolve more tickets. Start using these features today and experience why some many businesses are beginning to embrace the JIRA solution.

Lighthouse uses JIRA for all testing engagements, whether we are testing eCommerce sites, mobile applications, or other software applications. We have developed a custom JIRA dashboard to give our test managers and our clients transparency into our entire testing process. We feel it is important that all stakeholders have continuous visibility into the software product quality and efficiency of the test team. With this testing tool, managers, at all levels, can quickly see the health of their project and report the status. If you want to know how Lighthouse’s testing team and metrics can improve your software quality, contact us or give us a call at 937.458.0055.

Keep Having Fun,

Software Testing | Vendor Quality Management | Oracle ERP (E-Business Suite)

References:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Generating+Reports
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/plugin.jep
https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Customising+the+Dashboard