In a recent discussion for our GetAnswers video, Milind Gautam and Ravi Sagar addressed two common questions about Jira and other Atlassian tools. Here is a summary of why Jira is crucial for engineering students and a comparison of the best methods for hiding fields within projects.
Jira Relevance for Engineering Students
Learning Jira is sensible for engineering students because it is a very popular tool used extensively for software development in IT companies. Since most students in software-related fields will eventually work for software companies, they will definitely be working on Jira.
While Jira is a vast tool, students do not need to learn everything. The bare minimum a student should know is:
- What Jira is.
- How it is used in the software development process.
Jira often serves as a central tool in software development methodologies, encompassing the entire process from requirement gathering and planning to development and solution design.
Hiding Fields in Jira: Configuration vs. Context
When attempting to hide a field in a Jira project, you generally have two options: Field Configuration and Custom Field Context (Context).
- Field Configuration
- Description: A setting used to make a field required, optional, or completely hidden. Hiding a field via configuration causes it to disappear entirely from the associated project.
- Use Case: Recommended when working on projects that are unrelated, have different configurations, and different ways of working.
- Custom Field Context (Context)
- Description: A more controlled method that defines whether a field should be applicable in a specific project or not. You can create a new context to limit a field's applicability to selected projects (e.g., 'project demo' and 'project X') and specific issue types (e.g., 'bug').
- Use Case: Better suited for multiple projects that have some overlap or common working methodologies, as it allows for configuration reuse (themes) while still controlling field visibility.
Key Differences:
- Control: Context is considered a more controlled way of managing field availability than field configuration.
- Visibility: Field configuration only displays fields that are already available through context.
- Granularity: Context offers more granularity, allowing you to control options in drop-down fields to be different between projects (e.g., Project A needs four options, but Project B needs three different options).
Ravi Sagar noted that, if given a choice, he would be more inclined to use context for managing field availability.
