2. Agenda: JIRA Customization
•
•
•
•
Why there is interest in something like JIRA
What can JIRA do to help?
Some important features of JIRA
Inside JIRA
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
3. Business Area’s View
Why is there a
different TOOL
Why is there a
or a different
different TOOL
or PROCESS,
a different
depending on the
PROCESS,
type of request?
depending on the
type of request?
Why is it so hard to
request it so from IT
Why is work hard to
- and then find out
request work from IT
what’s then find out
- and happening on
my happening
what’s request? on
my request?
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
4. IT’s View
My manager
can’t easily
tell when I
have too much
work to do to
meet deadlines.
Why is it so
hard to figure
out what I
should work on
next?
I sure spend a
lot of time
just providing
a status on my
work.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
I can’t finish my
work until I hear
back from the
customer.
5. Everyone’s View
Why is it so
hard to find
out what work
is happening
around here?
Why is it so
easy for
something to
fall through
the cracks?
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
6. What can JIRA do to help?
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
7. What is JIRA?
• JIRA is an issue
tracker made by
Atlassian.
• It integrates easily
with Confluence and
their other tools.
• Whether you call
them bugs, tasks,
improvements or work
requests, JIRA
provides an
efficient way to
track and manage
your work - which
can have a big
impact on
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
productivity andrajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
8. Some Important Features of JIRA
Authentication
Dashboards
Workflows
Project Administration
Issue Searching
Issue Linking
Attachments and
Screenshots
Time Tracking
Ticklers and Notifications
Reports
… and more!
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
9. Authentication
• Users are
authenticated against
LDAP/Active Directory
repositories.
• ‘Remember Me’ provides
an automatic logon
when the user next
visits the JIRA site.
Benefit: Quicker access to application; no new password to
remember.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
10. Dashboards
• Users can have one or more
dashboards as their start page,
showing Dynamic Information
presented in text or graphics. (Click
within to drill-down.)
• A shared dashboard can be used by
a team to track progress, view
metrics or triage inbound requests.
Benefit: Immediate access to
meaningful metrics that can be
used to track the health of a
project or application, and to
manage resources’ workloads.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
13. Workflows
• Workflows define the
validations and lifecycle of
an issue.
• They can be shared by
several projects, or be
unique.
• Workflows can be simple
or quite complex.
Benefit: Streamlined
processes, with increased
accuracy, consistency and
timeliness.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
14. Project Administrations
• The Project Administrator (team lead or project manager, typically)
controls who has access to their data and what that access should be.
Benefit: Control over who can view or edit issues is
handled locally, without Systems Administration involvement.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
15. Issue Searching
• Filters allows you to find the issues in which you’re interested.
• You can search for issues based on every built-in or custom field.
• Filters can also be:
- Saved for reuse
- Shared with others
- Subscribed to (so it runs and emails you results on a scheduled
-
basis)
Used within a Dashboard gadget
Filter results can be exported to Word, Excel, PDF and XML or
rendered as a chart.
Benefit: Better transparency. Everyone can see what is
being worked on and what progress is being made.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
16. Issue Linking
• One issue can linked to another to clarify any sort of relationship
or dependency, such as:
-
Blocks / Is Blocked By
Duplicates / Is Duplicated By
Replaces / Is Replaced By
Benefit: More effective resource management, by
bundling similar/related issues together.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
17. Attachments and Screeshots
• Issues can contain file
attachments and
screenshots.
• Screenshots can be
pasted into the issue
directly from the
clipboard.
• Some fields support
Wiki Markup to
present text
effectively.
Benefit: One central
place to store all
artifacts and
comments about an
issue.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
18. Time Tracking
• Time tracking
features allow for
the input and
monitoring of
Actual and
Estimated time
spent on an
activity.
Benefit: Allows more effective management of resources,
and more accurate billing.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
19. Ticklers and Notifications
• Email notifications can be configured so everyone on your team is
aware of the right things, like changes to any issue created by
you or assigned to you.
• Specified “watchers” can be added to individual issues to ensure
the right people stay in the loop.
• Ticklers can be defined, to ensure actions occur automatically
when needed, such as:
- Close any issues that been inactive 90 days or more.
- Send a reminder email if the customer hasn’t responded to a
request for information within 10 days.
Benefit: Less manual effort required to keep others
informed and follow-up.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
20. Reports
• JIRA comes with several built-in reports, like the following. More are
available via plugins:
Average Age
Resolution Time
Created vs. Resolved
Issues
Time Since Issues
Single-level Group By
Time Tracking
Multiple-level Group By
User Workload
Project Pivot
Version Workload
Recently Created Issues
Workload Pie Chart
Benefit: Metrics that can be used to track the health of a
project or application, and to manage resources’
workloads.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
21. Additional Features
• Issues can be created or commented upon via email.
• Bulk Updates can be done against the issues returned by a filter, e.g.,
reassigning them, changing their Status.
• An issue can be cloned.
• An issue can be broken into one or more sub-tasks for more detailed
tracking or when there are multiple Assignees.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
22. Inside JIRA
Architecture
What is an Issue?
What is a Workflow?
Data-entry screens
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
23. Architecture
• Web-based (Java and AJAX).
• Supports several enterprise-class databases.
• Runs on the Apache Tomcat application server.
• Supports SOAP, XML RPC, and JAVA API interfaces.
• Features a plugin architecture, with over 150 plugins
available from the vendor and third-parties.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
24. What is an Issue?
• Issues are a trackable unit in JIRA.
• Issues are grouped into Project Categories then Projects, with
additional groupings if desired.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
25. What is an Issue? (continued)
• For a project dealing with Software Development, it might look
like this:
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
26. What is an Issue? (continued)
• A “Help Desk” project might look like this:
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
27. What is a Workflow?
• A workflow is associated with a project to define what
happens to issues as they move (i.e. transition) through
their lifecycle.
–
–
–
–
–
The Status at any point.
The conditions under which a transition to that Status is allowed.
Who can perform a given transition.
What validations should be performed.
What extra processing should be done after a transition.
Only QA
can
perform
this
transition
Assign the
issue back
to the
Reporter
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
Make sure the
user added a
Comment during
this
transition
28. Data-entry Screens
• Designing data-entry screens is simple.
• Screens can display any or all of JIRA’s built-in fields, plus an
unlimited number of custom fields.
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
29. Conclusion
• JIRA offers organizations the ability to
streamline and automate the tracking of
virtually anything that needs to be tracked.
• It can be customized to support your
particular requirements, thereby providing
the potential for greatly improving your
organization’s:
Productivity
Effectiveness
Communication
Metrics
JIRA Customization
Rajesh Prajapati
rajeshkprajapati@gmail.com
Editor's Notes
BugZero
Service Desk ticket
Lotus Notes DB
Email to an individual or mailing list
Need to request access to tool, learn how to use it to create a ticket.
Don’t know how to find out status of a request (effective querying)
No “one place” to find out work in queue, thus no way to easily work according to holistic view of priorities and deadlines
Reporting on progress is done manually (and often verbally), taking time away from work to be done.
Can’t always reassign ticket back to requestor (not part of typical new user setup) when waiting on customer response, so queue is misleading
Difficult to report on “aging” or otherwise bubble up to the top those items you’re interested in or want to clean up.
Ad-hoc process, thus often neglected
Just announced, now integrated with Google Apps in the Google Apps Marketplace.
Unlike Confluence where users have to be made members of a particular AD group, in JIRA we just preloaded 4000+ users (U.S., Ireland, Bermuda).
Employees hired in those locations before mid-December can access JIRA right now.
Can be integrated with Crowd, but we haven’t done so at this time.
JIRA is the first Atlassian product to act as an OpenSocial gadget container and hosting server, allowing it to use others’ gadgets (Gmail, iGoogle, etc.) and vice-versa.
Icons for PRIORITY
Icons for STATUS
Resolved issue appears as struckthrough text
Icon concisely shows Priority and Status
JIRA’s time tracking can be augmented with third-party tools to expand reporting or data-collection capability.
Worklog Assistant is one.
Set up mailbox or on local fileystem to receive the emails.
Using a scheduled service, JIRA scans periodically and creates issues/comments from the emails it finds.
If it sees a reference to an existing issue comment on existing issue
Otherwise new issue
Issue Creation:
Subject becomes Summary
Body becomes Issue Description
Attachments to email become attachments on email.
Comment Creation:
Body becomes Comment
Attachments to email become attachments on email.
SOAP and XML-RPC interfaces used for remote access to JIRA. (SOAP is more complete API)
SOAP is backed by Apache Axis, an open-source Java web services framework.
Plugins:
Agile methodology for sprint planning, burndown charts, etc.
Extend workflows
Extend time tracking and billing capability
Custom fields
Gadgets
Reports
Categories:
Projects
Workgroups
Built-in fields:
Issue Type
Status
Priority
Assignee
Reporter
Affects version
Fix version
Each project can customize built-in/custom fields:
visibility
values in select lists
description/help text