JIRA Plugin's to get Started with JIRA

JIRA is a powerful tracking tool with ability to isolate bugs, tasks etc. What makes it even more powerful is the hundreds of plugins available in the JIRA plugin exchange, which users can use to extend the already powerful features available to them. However sometime having too many options is also a bad thing, and with so many available it is not easy to pick the necessary or sometimes the essential ones. Every project team and organization is different, so it isn't easy to select the top JIRA plugin for beginners, but below are few that will provide a good starting point.

Although not a must have, if you are using plugins a lot when working with JIRA then this can help you manage them easily and you also have the ability to install and upgrade your plugins from the interface. The plugin is developed by Atlassian so there are no compatibility issues with JIRA but there might be problems when installing third party JIRA plugins, but this happens rarely.

Although not feature heavy and not featured JIRA Labels plugin is one of the frequently used and a very useful plugin for JIRA. This is used so frequently this was bundled with JIRA 4.2 release so you only have to manually add it if you are using a earlier version of JIRA. Since this article is about JIRA plugin of beginners hopefully you will be using the latest version and don't need to install this manually. Since the vendor is Atlassian you are unlikely to get compatibility issues.

There are quite a few diagram plugins available for JIRA. Some with specialized diagram types, some for business diagram types and some with support for almost any diagram type. Creately offers a good JIRA diagram plugin, which is scalable according to the number of licenses. However if you are looking for one specific diagrams type there maybe better options.

Since JIRA is mainly used for software projects, integrating JIRA with a version control system is a must. Since there are many version control systems I can't specify which one to use. GIT, Tortoise are some of the most commonly used systems so find a one that suits your needs.

As I mentioned before one of the reasons JIRA is so popular because it provided users the ability to extend its capabilities. Although the ones mentioned above are good starting points, there are plenty of plugin's which might be the perfect match for you. So make sure to do some research before installing them or purchasing them.