This book will introduce you to Atlassian JIRA, the world's most popular issue tracking software. JIRA provides issue and project tracking for software development teams to improve code quality and the speed of development.
This book will show you how to plan and design your own JIRA implementation. You will learn how to customize JIRA to adapt it to your organization and add value to your business. Chapters are structured to guide you through all the key aspects of JIRA. You will have created a practical implementation by the end of the book, working on it throughout as you learn about JIRA.
You will start by setting up your own JIRA and being introduced to all the key features in subsequent chapters. With each chapter, you will learn important concepts such as business processes, workflows, e-mails, and notifications, and you will have the opportunity to put your newly acquired knowledge into practice by following a live JIRA sample implementation.
Packed with real-life examples and step-by-step instructions, this book will help you become a JIRA expert.
This book is an in-depth guide to all the essential aspects of Atlassian JIRA
Chapter 1, Getting Started with JIRA, serves as starting point of the book and aims to guide you to set up a local copy of JIRA application that will be used throughout the book. By the end of the chapter, you should have a running JIRA application.
Chapter 2, Project Management, covers how to set up projects and project-related administration tasks in JIRA. The concept of schemes will also be introduced, as it is the core concept in JIRA administration.
Chapter 3, Issue Management, covers everything related to issue creation and operations that can be performed on an issue (excluding workflow transitions). Furthermore, this chapter will gently touch on various aspects of issues, as they are the focal point of JIRA. This chapter will also serve as an opportunity to show and allow you to set up dummy data that will be used by the sample project.
Chapter 4, Field Management, covers how JIRA collects data through the use of fields and how to expand on this ability through the use of custom fields. The chapter will then continue on with various behaviors that can be configured for fields.
Chapter 5, Screen Management, builds on top of the preceding chapter and explores the concept of screens and how users can create and manage their own screens. This chapter will tie in all the previous chapters to show the power behind JIRA's screen design capabilities.
Chapter 6, Workflow and Business Process, explores the most powerful feature offered by JIRA, workflows. The concept of issue life cycle will be introduced and various aspects of workflows explained. This chapter will also explore the relationship between workflows and other various JIRA aspects previously covered, such as screens. The concept of JIRA extensions will also be briefly touched in the sample project, using some popular free extensions.
Chapter 7, E-mail and Notification, focuses on how to get automatic e-mail notifications from JIRA and explores the different settings that can be applied. This is a very important and powerful feature of JIRA and also a critical part of the example project for this book. This chapter will also tie in the workflow chapter and explain in detail how JIRA manages its notification mechanism.
Chapter 8, Securing your JIRA, focuses on the different security control features offered by JIRA. As this topic affects all aspects of JIRA, all previous topics will be touched on, explaining how security can be applied to each.
Chapter 9, Searching, Reporting, and Analysis, will focuses on how data captured in JIRA can be retrieved to provide various types of reporting features.
Chapter 10, General Administration, covers other administration features offered by JIRA. These features often do not form the backbone of a JIRA installation but can be very useful when used properly.
The installation package used in this book will be the Windows Installer standalone distribution, which you can get directly from Atlassian at http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/JIRADownloadCenter.jspa.
At the time of writing, the latest version of JIRA is 4.2.
You will also need several additional softwares including Java SDK which you can get from http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads and MySQL which you can get from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads.
If you want to get started with JIRA, then this is the perfect book for you.
You will need to be familiar with basic computer operations, specifically the system on which you will use JIRA, and software project management.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
<Connector port="8443" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192" SSLEnabled="true" maxThreads="150" minSpareThreads="25" maxSpareThreads="75" enableLookups="false" disableUploadTimeout="true"
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
service.bat install JIRANew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "To access the ZIP option, click on the Show all link to the right-hand side."
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