Just like issue types, Jira comes with a number of built-in fields. You have already seen a few of them in the previous chapters. For example, when creating new stories for your agile boards, there are fields such as summary, priority, and assignee. These fields make up the backbone of an issue, and you cannot remove them from the system. For this reason, they are referred to as system fields.

While Jira's built-in fields are quite comprehensive for agile software development uses, most organizations soon find they have special requirements that cannot be addressed simply with the default fields available. To help you tailor Jira to your organization's needs, Jira lets you create and add your own fields to the system, called custom fields.

Jira comes with many types of custom fields, ranging from simple text fields, and select lists, to more complex ones, such as cascading select lists and user selectors. And if you find these are not sufficient enough, there are many more you can get from the Atlassian Marketplace, where you can find more specialized fields that talk to Salesforce.com, and many more. To start adding new custom fields to Jira:

1. Browse to the Jira administration console.
2. Select the Issues tab and then the Custom fields option.
3. Click on the Add Custom Field button. This will bring you to step 1 of the process, where you can select the custom field type.
4. Search and select the custom field type you wish to add, and click on Next. This will bring you to step 2 of the process, where you can specify the custom field's name and options:

5. Enter values for the Name and Description fields. If you are creating a selection-based custom field, such as a select list, you will need to add its select options too (you can update this list later):

6. Click on the Create button. This will bring you to the last step of the process, where you can specify the screen to which you would like to add the field.
7. Select the screens and click on Update. The following screenshot shows that the newly created field has been added to both of the support screens:

After you have created the custom field, you can always come back later and customize it. For example, with our origin select list field, we have added three options when creating the field. If more options are needed, we can edit the field and add more options to it.