How good is Jira Software for localization project managers? In this quick tutorial, I’ll show you how to set up a simple project in JIRA from scratch ✅
Welcome to another episode in this series! Every month we’ll check out a new project management platform and see how viable it is for localization. All online software will be either free or with a free trial so that you can try it on your own.
In this video, I’m going to show you a quick way how you can set up JIRA from scratch to track, manage your translation, localization, or whatever kind of projects you have. I’ve been using JIRA a long, long time ago, a couple of years ago, where I think it was top notch. Now that I try to use it again, I see some things that I’m not so happy about. But the good thing is that Jira, I think it wasn’t like this before is now available as a free product for up to 10 users. So everything that I’m going to do, you can try on your own.
So let’s get started, we’re going to create project first, and we don’t have to do it from scratch, we can use a template here you can see there is a project management one available to you, I have it on top of the list because I just use it to prepare for this video. But if you’re new just starting out, you can find it and work management. And here is the Project Management template. We’re going to name our project, project A and then hit Create Project. And you might encounter an error like I have just now I’m not sure what is happening. But when I refresh the page, hopefully it will be fine. All right, there we go. So our project is set up.
As you can see here, it starts with a board to come number view. And it has these three columns, which represent the three default statuses that you have for your tasks as usually we’re going to first start by updating adjusting the structure of the task, the information that we want to track for each task. And we do this in the list view in the headers. Here you can see the default fields that JIRA puts into this project management templates. There are a couple of them that we don’t need, but you cannot delete them. Because these are default JIRA fields like for example priority very default JIRA field, so we are just going to hide it same as with labels, you can see we have a due date, which is very important, but we’re missing the start date, and that one is hidden by default. So you can unhide it by selecting this one and now should be added to our header. But for some reason, I don’t know how to move to the right side. So I actually have to create the first task so that I get this scroll bar and then I can see the start date this right here. This is one of the things that makes my head scratch a little bit. It’s a little bit inconvenient to in this way. But okay, I’m going to move the start date for to due date. Here, we also have two out of date fields created and updated. These are automatic fields, which get updated anything on when you create or update the ticket the task. And also the same goes for the record. The reason why it’s called reporter is because it’s historically I guess, JIRA was mostly used for effect, issue tracking, and maybe for software development. So that’s when you had like the reporter who reported the issue.
Next thing that we’re going to do is I’m going to move the category, which we’re going to use a little bit later on, but it’s here between the dates. So that kind of separates the dates that we manually enter and that we mostly need from the automatic fields, we will not use the automatic fields. But I think it’s always nice to have them so that you can see when tasks were edit and when they were changed, and so on. So now that we have our structure sort of ironed out, I’m going to rename the test task into reprocessing. So what we usually have and this one is that hours, and after that, I’m going to add another one which is translation of 15,000 words. Now, here are you saw another thing, which I am not sure why it’s happening in 2023. And that is there is a slight delay. After you add the asks sometimes it even happened to me that it wasn’t showing even after I don’t know five or 10 seconds, like I really had to reload the whole page to see the translation or the new task that just edits. So I’m not sure why this is happening. So be prepared for that. I’m going to add one more machine translation post editing to do for 30 hours here.
If you’ve seen any previous videos that I do in the series, you know that these are three tasks that belong to three, let’s say subcategories or groups. So pre processing is language independent, it’s done for every language translation is done for German, Japanese and machine translation, post editing is done for French and Korean and that’s where we are actually going to utilize the Category field. So I’m going to say tag this or mark this as the language independent category is one we’re going to say it’s German, Japanese. And then finally we have French and Korean. As always, let’s group it by these category which you can do because the category is not a default gr field and you end up with this thing. So as you can see it is sorted alphabetically based on the values so D goes before F Have an F, of course before l. But we actually want to have language independent at the top. Now, this is something that I struggled with when I was preparing for this video because I thought that okay, if this is a default field, maybe I will create my own custom field that I can set up with my own values. And I can sort them, you can actually do that in the Project Settings under issue types. Here, you can add a field, the problem is that you cannot group by new custom fields, you can only utilize the ones that are created by default from JIRA. So that is a little bit of a challenge, I would say. So in this case, since we want to group things for sure, we actually have to name the categories in a way so that they’re already sorted alphabetically. So I’m going to expand the other two categories. And so for language independent, I’m going to edit it here and put one at start German, Japanese, we’re going to put number two there, and French and Korean, we’re going to put three before net. So everything has been updated. But the table is not changed. So I have to refresh it. Now hopefully, the sorting will work because now it’s sorted by 123. It’s not ideal, must me I know. But this is the workaround, if you want to group the tasks within your project. Now that we know how to group the tasks, what I’m going to do in the next few minutes is I’m going to enter the remaining tasks. And I’ll see you in a bit.
And we’re back. So I was able to add all the tasks and assign them to the corresponding category. And I also added the start date and due date, right now, as you can see, it’s a little bit of a mess, because I’m not sure how it’s sorted by default. So we are just going to add the sorting by the due date. And there you have it. Another important thing that you haven’t seen while I was doing this, in my own free time is that I actually had to manually go into this list and select the option, there’s no way how you can copy any value here from one server to another. For example, right now I’m selecting the processing, I did Ctrl C, it and now I’m doing Ctrl V, it just doesn’t work. And as maybe you know from the other videos, this is, I think a little bit of a disadvantage. There are many other platforms that allow you to do this, because in this view, you pretty much it looks like a spreadsheet, right? So you cannot copy the values. It’s really annoying.
And now that our project is created, and all the dates are set up, we can go to the timeline, which should be the majestic thing where you can track your projects and see everything. But a problem here is that you have even more restrictions than you have in the list view. As you can see here, it’s sorted by I don’t even know by what and you cannot even group things here like you can in the ListView. You know, so if we wanted to group things by the category, I we cannot do that. And right now, it’s really a mess, because I think it’s somehow sorting by maybe the key but also based on the store date because it looks like these things are starting before but translation belongs to German, Japanese and NTP, belongs to Korean. So there’s absolutely no relationship, maybe it changes when you link them together. I don’t know, I don’t want to go into that. But this to me is really, really annoying. Just in the last video where I first explorer air table in air table, you have not only one level of grouping, but you can set up an unlimited number of groupings based on any field that you create. And it was beautiful to see all your projects in that view. So that also brings me to another point is that we will not be creating project B like we normally do, because maybe I’m just not that experienced with JIRA, but I didn’t find a way where you can view tasks grouped by projects in one view here in JIRA. So you have a dashboard where you can create a dashboard. A dashboard usually just has some metrics kind of aggregated things, and you cannot see this nice timeline or Gantt chart view. So technically an alternative would be to use something like a grouping where one group would actually represent your project, then we would still have the problem that you wouldn’t be able to group it by projects on this timeline view.
So that is how you can get started with JIRA. I know that JIRA probably can be used for many other things in a much better way. But right now, I guess my conclusion would be to my big surprise, because I was always a fan of JIRA is that there are way far more better platforms especially if you want to track your own projects. See in the next video