This blog is on hold

There's not been much posted in this blog for the last year because most of my JIRA-related blogs have been published on the official ServiceRocket blog at http://www.servicerocket.com/blog. I recommend following that blog instead for JIRA and other Atlassian posts.

I'm still heading up the Atlassian consulting work at ServiceRocket and I'll be attending Atlassian Summit 2014 in San Jose, CA in a few weeks. I'm part of the "Governing JIRA at Scale" presentation from Jordan Dea-Mattson of Yahoo.

Finally, I'm considering an update for Practical JIRA Administration sometime later this year.

Book Update

The third update of Practical JIRA Administration for JIRA 6 has just gone into production at O'Reilly.

Apart from the updates for the new features in JIRA 6 I've also added a chapter about JIRA Migrations,  with lots of advice about moving data into JIRA from other systems.

~Matt

All the good bugs are old bugs?

JIRA lets you vote on issues, and Atlassian's own JIRA instance has a few issues with thousands of votes. I wondered if there were any popular issues that had been created recently so I plotted the number of votes against when each issue was created.

The result is shown below. I think it means that Atlassian are already aware of what people really want from their product, or perhaps that they're doing a good job closing new issues as duplicates of older ones. What other meanings can you take from this chart?

Book Update

Now that JIRA 6.0 has been released I've started the update for Practical JIRA Administration. If you have any changes you'd like to suggest for the book then now is a good time to contact me.

Where's Matt?

This blog's been quiet for a while now due to my consulting work at CustomWare ramping up. We're always looking for more consultants to help with the load. It's never the same day twice!

Both of the O'Reilly JIRA books were updated, and Practical JIRA Administration is scheduled to be updated for JIRA 6.0 in the next few months.

And my personal choice for the most useful JIRA add-on for JIRA administrators is Script Runner by Jamie Echlin. His hours of work have saved me hours of work. Thanks!

Really making a JIRA project read-only

Sometimes you want to make a JIRA project read-only, perhaps for archive purposes. It's easy enough to create a permission scheme that gives Browse Projects permission to the same users and removes everyone from the Edit Issues permission. However issues can still change status. That's right, the Edit Issues permission does not stop you from reopening an issue.

The workaround is simple if tedious. Add a condition to every transition in the workflows used by that project. The condition should check that the current user has the Edit Issues permission.

After pondering this for a few minutes, I think that the default JIRA workflow should have this condition on all of its transitions but that's probably not likely to happen. Anyway, I updated http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Archiving+a+Project to make this clearer. 

My Atlassian Batting Average

There's a baseball statistic named Batting Average that measures the number of successes compared with the number of attempts. I've created many bugs for Atlassian over the last seven years, so I thought I'd see what's happened to them.

Depending on how you measure success my batting average is up somewhere near 0.6, which is higher than I expected. 

Allowing anyone to submit a bug was, and still is, a huge stance for a company to take. Kudos to the Atlassian teams that manages to process all those issues!