How to make most out of Jira?

It has been quite a while (still < 1 year), I am using Atlassian Jira for bug/issue tracking withing my team of roughly 15. Previously, we were using a version of Redmine, doped to suit company environment.

I had read, heard a lot about Jira's abilities regarding how it can be useful to ease the project management and accurately measure the project's progress. But, recently under peer pressure of my group, where I was required to file some appropriate bugs/improvements/tasks, along with doing myriad of other things, I learned  importance of using Jira.

How we can make most out it?

Well, Jira is no magic, but just a tool; rather, it provides a platform for task management. So, all task management is left to you. Here's how I did and worked well for me

• create a high-level abstract issue of big task you will be working on and put in the initial estimates if you already know or leave it to the sub-tasks
• divide the task into concrete sub-tasks with concrete estimates
• and work !

That's it! Its that really simple. Instead of adding a bunch of many issues, this way of filing issues into Jira really helped me to work efficiently and convey accurate project progress to my mangers. At times, I also had to update the estimates for the tasks but earlier you do it the better it is. That was the overall gist of it.