No Need To Restart JIRA

Atlassian Summit has come and gone, and was a lot of fun. My book was well received, so I'm happy. Something else makes me very happy is the release of JIRA 4.4. Beta1 because now all JIRA plugins can be reloaded without restarting JIRA.

It's a simple thing but it used to suck so much time during plugin development. This time I was creating a new Active Objects plugin, so installed it as usual for a JIRA plugin. Then I rebuilt it and uploaded it from the JIRA plugin manager. Three clicks later the updated plugin was installed and working.

Hurrah!

~Matt

Editing finished!

I've just finished editing my book "Practical JIRA Administration". Look for it from O'Reilly soon! If all goes well, there should be some printed copies available at Atlassian Summit in June.

~Matt 

More JIRA book news

The breaking news is that I just signed an agreement with O'Reilly to produce another book. The working title is "Practical JIRA Development" and the scope is JIRA administration and plugin development, just like this blog.

It's part of O'Reilly's push towards realtime publishing so it will be sweet and short. As Mike Loukides noted:

"We're looking for manuscripts that are roughly 30-70 print pages long"

The book will be written in DocBook and committed to a repository with automated builds of the book. Nice and agile!

What's a "metatracker"?

There's an updated Python document about how the Python development team should triage issues. While every team does this differently, it's interesting to compare concepts in another system to the same ideas in JIRA. There's also a reference to a "meta tracker", defined as "the tracker about the issue tracker". I suppose the canonical example of a meta tracker is the Atlassian JIRA instance at http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA.

It's a useful word for me because I often end up having to create a JIRA project or component for clients for tracking the changes they want to make to JIRA. Now I can refer to it as the metatracker and say things like "the tracker is the meta tracker". Just not with a straight face.

~Matt

p.s. The technical review work on the upcoming JIRA book is proceeding nicely, but I've heard no news on a release date yet.

JIRA book news

Last month I posted an article about why I wasn't writing a book about JIRA. Now Packt publishing is working on one and have asked me to be a technical reviewer for it.  Nothing is certain until a book is printed (probably next year) but this is good progress.

~Matt

Why isn't there a JIRA book?

People occasionally ask me why I haven't written a book about JIRA. I wrote Practical Development Environments for O'Reilly a few years ago and enjoyed doing so. I have lots of ideas for what would make a good book about JIRA. So what's the problem? Well, here's the gist of a reply I sent to a publisher recently:

I'd love to write that book! My problem is that I don't want to spend a year working 8pm to 2am for minimal pay.  That's horribly destructive to family life. Nowadays I'm in a consulting position where I could probably do it as a day job in around 6 months, but who's going to pay me to do that? Atlassian might consider it taking it on as marketing expense but my understanding is that what it would cost them is far larger than what they might ever expect to make.

My sense is that technical books are created because their authors felt "it just needed doing" or "because it's there", but not for rational financial reasons. Yet if this blog ends up containing a useful number of articles I wouldn't object to publishing them as a book.