How to create and manage Components in Jira Software

On this post we will learn how to create and manage components on Jira, it is a very useful features of Jira that can help us to organize our issues and projects. But before start with the technical part , we will take a look some important things.

What is a Component in Jira?

In Jira Software a component is a field that let us groups issues within projects under common areas, such as a product feature, a department, or a workstream. Components provide a structured way to categorize work, that allow teams to organize tasks, improve transparency, and streamline processes led by an owner to specific categories of work.

So that, our next question can be :

Why is needed create and manage Components in Jira?

Jira Components are important because allow us to organize, track, and manage issues along project life cycle by grouping tasks into logical categories like product features, departments, or workstreams. They provide structure for larger projects, increase team transparency by allowing focused reporting on specific areas, and enable automation by setting default assignees for components. By manage components wisely help streamline project workflows, ensure standardized naming for issue types, and offer clear ownership for specific project areas.

All right, once knew it , we will start with the practice

Step 1 : Open the Project Setting

The area to manage Components are on the Setting of the Project, do click on the “…” icon of the Project that you want to create components and then click on Project Settings

It will lead you to the next screen

Step 2 : Create a new Component

Once on the Project Setting Screen, click on Components and then on Create Component

By clicking on that button, will be open the next screen, where you will set the :

Name : Choice a clear name for the component that help the team members and anyone involved in the project to identify easily later.

Description : Is a good practices to add a description even if the name of the component give us an idea.

Component Lead: not always the Component lead will be the team leader , the project manager or the Scrum Master, etc.., a Component lead could be a team member who understand better this area and have technical and business knowledge on this part of the Product , in last instance the Component lead can advice if the work item that have this component actually belongs to it

Default Assignee: Select an option on the list, by this every new issue created to this component will be assigned to a user by default, it doesnt means necessary that this person will take ownership of the task, the assignee can change in base of team decision, from my experience the Component lead take the tasks in first instance and then after an analysis the ticket can be assigned to another team member.

Once filled the fields, Save it

So that, you will see the new component on the screen below, so from that point you are ok to categorise your issues with this brand new component.

Manage Components

On the right size you can see these 3 little points, from that option is possible to manage the component (Edit, Delete)

Just be careful with Delete option, it can affect several issues on the project, associated reports, filters and Dashboards

In Action

so will see this changes in Action, create a new issue as bellow and select the Backend Component:

Once clicked on Create and open the issue you should see the Assignee as was setup before.

So that, from now we can see on Filters, the issues that have, for example, “Backend” as component

but one thing that you can notice is a “+1” on the first 2 tickets, it means that these issues have more components, so, we could make the next question.

An Issue can belong to more components?

Yes, on Jira, an issue can belong to multiple components, although an issue’s primary component for reporting purposes might be chosen based on the first component listed alphabetically. This allows us to organize and categorize issues across different parts of a project, such as “Backend” and “Database”, etc.. if an issue relates to both, and automatically assign the issue to a component owner for that component.

For this example I created 2 more components as below:

Frontend component lead is John Smith, Backend component lead is Jose Suarez and API component lead is Patrick Kelly, it could lead us to the next question.

How is the default assignee if an issue belongs to more components?

For example, on this screen we are creating a new issue and it belongs to Backend and Frontend components, and as we can see above, these components have different leads, so who will be the assignee for this issue?

For this type of cases, Jira take a simple decision : “If a Jira issue belongs to multiple components with different default assignees, Jira assigns the issue to the default assignee of the component that appears first in alphabetical order. “

Then we can conclude that the default assignee for this ticket will be the lead of the Component Backend, Jose Suarez

Just one advice before finish this post, we can change this rule by creating automations , so then we can ensure that the issue is assigned to the proper person.

Ok, I hope it help you, see you next post!