Jira
Atlassian's project tracking tool — the standard for engineering team sprint management and issue tracking at most tech companies.
Jira is the dominant project management and issue-tracking tool for software engineering teams, used to plan sprints, track bugs, and manage work across large organizations. Familiarity with Jira is assumed at most engineering, product management, and technical operations roles, particularly at companies using Agile or Scrum methodologies.
Typical time to job-readiness: ~1 week.
Learning Jira
Beginner
Create and manage issues (stories, bugs, tasks), work within a sprint board, and use basic JQL for filtering your work.
Intermediate
Configure board workflows, manage epics and roadmaps, run backlog grooming sessions, and generate velocity and burndown reports for the team.
Advanced
Administer Jira projects (permission schemes, workflow configurations, automation rules), and integrate with GitHub, Confluence, and CI/CD pipelines.
Key concepts
- Issue types: Story (user-facing feature), Bug, Task, and Epic (group of stories)
- Sprint — time-boxed iteration (usually 2 weeks) for completing a set of stories
- Story points — relative effort estimates, not hours; used for velocity tracking
- JQL (Jira Query Language) for filtering and searching issues precisely
- Workflow states: To Do → In Progress → In Review → Done (customizable per team)
- Backlog refinement — reviewing and estimating upcoming work before sprint planning
Common interview topics
- Explain how you would structure epics, stories, and tasks for a new feature
- What is JQL and how have you used it
- How do you handle bugs that come in mid-sprint
- How do velocity and burndown charts help a team
- What makes a well-written user story