Jira questions come up in interviews for project managers, Scrum masters, business analysts and QA roles. Interviewers want to know you can organise work, track progress and keep a team’s board useful.
Basics
What is Jira used for?
Jira is Atlassian’s work-tracking tool. Teams use it to plan and track tasks, bugs and features, often with Agile methods such as Scrum and Kanban.
What issue types are common?
Epics (large bodies of work), stories (features from a user’s point of view), tasks, bugs and sub-tasks. Teams can customise issue types to fit their process.
What is a workflow?
A workflow defines the statuses an issue moves through, such as To Do, In Progress, In Review and Done, and the transitions allowed between them. Workflows can include rules, such as requiring a field before closing.
Boards and Agile
Scrum board vs Kanban board?
A Scrum board plans work in time-boxed sprints with a backlog and sprint goals. A Kanban board shows continuous flow, often with work-in-progress limits, and doesn’t use sprints.
How do you run a sprint in Jira?
Refine and estimate backlog items, create a sprint, drag the committed issues into it, start it with a goal and dates, track progress on the board during the sprint, and complete it, moving any unfinished work to the backlog or next sprint.
Which reports do you use?
Burndown charts show remaining work during a sprint. Velocity charts show completed work across sprints and help planning. Cumulative flow diagrams show bottlenecks on Kanban boards.
JQL and Administration
What is JQL?
Jira Query Language is used to search issues. For example: project = WEB AND status = "In Progress" AND assignee = currentUser(). Saved searches can power filters, dashboards and boards.
What are components, labels and fix versions?
Components group issues by part of the product, labels are flexible tags, and fix versions link issues to a planned release.
How do you keep a Jira board clean?
Agree on clear definitions of each status and of done, refine the backlog regularly, close stale issues, and use consistent issue types and fields.
How to Prepare
- Be ready to describe how you set up or improved a team’s board.
- Practise a few JQL queries.
- Review project manager interview questions.
Get Help in the Interview Itself
Preparation gets you most of the way. For the interview itself, ApplyQuick Interview Copilot listens to each question and suggests a structured answer based on your resume and the job description, on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet or a phone call. You can also rehearse first with an AI mock interview. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial.
