JIRA is an issue-tracking tool from Atlassian, which has gained immense popularity in recent years due to its ease of use, its customization abilities, and finely grained control over various functions. Out of the box, JIRA offers issue and bug tracking capabilities to create tasks, assign it to users, and generate useful reports. However, the real power of JIRA lies in the customization that it offers.
Experienced JIRA administrators looking to learn advanced topics and expand their knowledge will benefit from this book.
Packed with real-world examples and use cases, you will first learn how to plan the JIRA installation. Then, you will be given a brief refresher of the fundamental concepts. You will also understand the customizations in detail, along with a sample data for various use cases. Several aspects of JIRA administration, such as user management, groups, roles, and security levels, will be covered keeping in mind the applications for enterprises. Next, this book will take you through the add-on development to extend JIRA functionalities. It will also give you insights on how to build applications on top of JIRA using the REST API. Various aspects of the migration process from other tools using the CSV file will also be discussed.
The implementation of Scrum and Kanban techniques, along with Agile reports, will be discussed. We will take a look at the Groovy script, which is a great tool that empowers JIRA administrators with tremendous flexibility. We will also take a look at some of the common database tables to fetch useful results and discuss the possibilities to add custom CSS and JavaScript in our JIRA instance. Finally, we will conclude the book by going through the best practices and troubleshooting steps to help you find out what went wrong and how to fix it.
Chapter 1, Planning Your JIRA Installation, covers planning of the JIRA installation to ensure longevity of the installation so that it can accommodate more users and data in the future; the installation and update process is also discussed briefly in this chapter.
Chapter 2, Searching in JIRA, has detailed explanation on how data can be fetched from JIRA using the Basic search feature, as well as by writing advanced queries using JQL.
Chapter 3, Reporting – Charts to Visualize the Data, covers various built-in project reports that come with JIRA. It also covers how to present them in the Dashboards.
Chapter 4, Customizing JIRA for Test Management, explains how to modify the configurations to implement new Issue Types for Test Campaign and Test Case. The procedure to implement a new workflow with conditions, along with new permission schemes, will be discussed in detail in this chapter.
Chapter 5, Sample Implementation of Use Cases, has a lot of examples of different implementations, such as a helpdesk system and requirement management, which readers can leverage in their company.
Chapter 6, User Management, Groups, and Project Roles, explains how to manage users in JIRA and the way to organize them in various groups.
Chapter 7, Configuring JIRA User Directories to Connect with LDAP, Crowd, and JIRA User Server, discusses how to integrate your JIRA instance with LDAP and Crowd for external user management.
Chapter 8, JIRA Add-on Development and Leveraging REST API, explains how to start developing add-ons for JIRA to extend its functionalities. The JIRA REST API that enables accessing JIRA's functionalities from external tools is also discussed with examples.
Chapter 9, Importing and Exporting Data in JIRA, talks about how data from external tools can be imported using the CSV import and Project Import feature. The importance of taking regular backups is explained in this chapter, along with the procedure to restore JIRA from the backup file.
Chapter 10, Working with JIRA Agile, explains how to implement the Scrum and Kanban technique in JIRA. The planning of your Sprints in the Scrum and various customizations that one can perform in these boards is discussed in detail, along with Burndown and Velocity charts to track the progress of the project.
Chapter 11, JIRA Administration with Groovy Script Runner, introduces the add-on that administrators can install and various additional features using scripting that it brings, which helps JIRA administrators with various customizations that were otherwise not possible.
Chapter 12, Accessing the Database, explains fetching the data directly from JIRA's database. This chapter has various useful queries to retrieve information from the database. The way to access data from embedded HSSQL database has also been explained.
Chapter 13, Customizing Look and Feel and Behavior, talks about how to perform extreme changes in the JIRA design using custom style sheets. This chapter also discusses the possibility to control the HTML fields using JavaScript.
Chapter 14, JIRA Best Practices, discusses various points that JIRA administrators should keep in mind not only before implementing JIRA, but also various practices that they should employ on an ongoing basis.
Chapter 15, Troubleshooting JIRA, is the last chapter where various ways to identify the problems in the instance is discussed. Common problems that people face in JIRA are listed in this chapter.
Appendix, Integrating JIRA with Other Tools, has details on how various tools, such as Git, Bitbucket, and Confluence can be integrated with JIRA.
To install and run JIRA, the following software and tools are required:
JIRA 6.3.7 or higher
MySQL 5.6 or higher
Java 1.7 or higher
PHP 5.4
Chrome 7 or higher
Firefox 4 or higher
Wherever applicable, the details on obtaining these software and their usage is explained in relevant chapters.
If you are a JIRA administrator managing small to medium JIRA instances and want to learn how to manage enterprise scale instances, then this book will help you in expanding your knowledge and will equip you with advanced skills. Prior understanding of JIRA core concepts is required. Also, basic knowledge of CSS, JavaScript, and Java will be helpful.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We have created a MySQL database name as jiradb, database username as jirauser, and database password as password."
A block of code is set as follows:
#if ($issue.getCustomFieldValue("customfield_10000"))
<tr valign="top">
<td >
#text("Analysis"):
</td>
<td>
$issue.getCustomFieldValue("customfield_10000")
</td>
</tr>
#endAny command-line input or output is written as follows:
mysql -u USERNAME -p
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "When the test case is moved to Failed state, change the issue priority to major."
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
You can download the example code files from your account at http://www.packtpub.com for all the Packt Publishing books you have purchased. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you could report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded to our website or added to any list of existing errata under the Errata section of that title.
To view the previously submitted errata, go to https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/support and enter the name of the book in the search field. The required information will appear under the Errata section.
Piracy of copyrighted material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at <[email protected]> with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors and our ability to bring you valuable content.
If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at <[email protected]>, and we will do our best to address the problem.