Book Image

JIRA 5.x Development Cookbook

Book Image

JIRA 5.x Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

JIRA provides issue tracking and project tracking for software development teams to improve code quality and the speed of development. "JIRA 5.x Development Cookbook" is a one stop resource to master extensions and customizations in JIRA. You will learn how to create your own JIRA plugins, customize the look and feel of your JIRA UI, work with workflows, issues, custom fields, and much more. "JIRA 5.x Development Cookbook" starts with recipes on simplifying the plugin development process followed by a complete chapter dedicated to the plugin framework to master plugins in JIRA. Then we will move on to writing custom field plugins to create new field types or custom searchers. We then learn how to program and customize workflows to transform JIRA into a user friendly system. Reporting support in an application like JIRA is inevitable! With so much data spanning across different projects, issues, and so on, and a lot of planning done for the project, we will cover how to work on reports and gadgets to get customized data according to our needs. We will then look at customizing the various searching aspects of JIRA such as JQL, searching in plugins, managing filters, and so on. "JIRA 5.x Development Cookbook" steers towards programming issues, such as creating, editing, and deleting issues, creating new issue operations, managing the various other operations available on issues via the JIRA APIs, and so on. In the latter half of "JIRA 5.x Development Cookbook", you will learn how to customize JIRA by adding new tabs, menus, and web items, communicate with JIRA via the REST, SOAP or XML/RPC interfaces, and work with the JIRA database. The book ends with a chapter on useful and general JIRA recipes.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
JIRA 5.x Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


Workflows are one standout feature that help users to transform JIRA into a user-friendly system. They help users to define a lifecycle for the issues, the purpose for which they are using JIRA, and so on. As the Atlassian documentation (http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+Workflow) says:

A JIRA workflow is the set of steps and transitions that an issue goes through during its lifecycle. Workflows typically represent business processes.

JIRA uses OpenSymphony's OSWorkflow, which is highly configurable and, more importantly, pluggable to cater for the various requirements. JIRA uses three different plugin modules to add extra functionalities into its workflow, which we will see in detail through this chapter.

To make things easier, JIRA ships with a default workflow. We can't modify the default workflow, but can copy it into a new workflow and amend it to suit our needs. Before we go into the development aspect of a workflow, it makes sense to understand the...