Using Jira Components The Right Way

What are components in Jira?

A component is a custom field in Jira software. It is used to categorize and group issues together under one project. 

For example, a website design project could have multiple issues related to either Web development or UX Design. By using components, you could group all web development issues in one component naming it Web Development and the same can be done for UX Design issues. 

It’s majorly helpful to break work into smaller sections which eventually helps teams to organize various issues/tasks by reducing cross dependencies.

Here are a few ways to use Jira Components effectively:

• Use Jira components for tracking bugs by adding a component to all bug related issues. 
• Use Jira components for adding tasks related to a new app feature.
• Use Jira components in marketing projects for grouping social media campaign related tasks to one component and advertising tasks to another.
• Use Jira components to increase transparency among teams to have visibility over the progress of issues/tasks. 
• Jira Components are used to create groups of issues that share a common theme or purpose. If you have a lot of issues that need to be grouped together into a single category, then components may be the solution for you.

You can also use components as a way to track different phases of a project—for example, you could have one component for “the design phase,” another for “the development phase,” etc., and then assign each issue to the appropriate phase (component). To see the progress of one component, you could also use a JQL Query like the one shown here:

Default assignee in the components field

The Components custom field has something that sets it apart from other fields you can typically find in a Jira issue – it has a default assignee. What this means is that any issue added to a component will be automatically assigned to the default assignee of that component making them responsible for it. 

This feature is quite handy when you have someone responsible for a certain aspect of the project like a team lead or a PM and they need to manage workload and prioritization.

Components as sub-projects in Jira

As Jira doesn’t have the concept of sub-projects, many teams tend to use components for this purpose. 

This is especially handy in large projects as you can apply a filter by components to analyze certain aspects of the bigger picture individually. This helps with understanding performance and predicting the future state as well as with preemptive identification of blockers (design is taking longer than expected, etc.). 

How to create a Jira Component?

If you’re an admin and are on a Company-managed Jira project, you can create a Jira Component. To add components to your Jira project, follow these steps:

• Go to Project Settings.

• On the left sidebar, find Components and click on it.

• Click on Create Component.

• Give it a Name (it can be anything but must be unique), write a Description (optional), select a Component lead, and then select the Default assignee. Finally, click on Save.
  • Description – It’s used to describe the components for others to understand what it’s used for.
  • Component Lead – A person designated as being responsible for issues that have the component.
  • Default Assignee – A person who is automatically assigned to the issue if the component is added.

Now that we have created the component, we can start adding this component to issues.

How to enable a component in Jira? Read the full article written by Oleksandr Siryi on TitanApps!