Preface

JIRA is a popular issue tracking tool from Atlassian and has amazing customization abilities and finely grained control over various functions. Out of the box, JIRA offers issue and bug tracking capabilities to create tasks, assign them to users, and generate useful reports. However, the real power of JIRA lies in the customizations it offers.

Experienced JIRA administrators looking to learn advanced topics and expand their knowledge will benefit from this book. This book provides a comprehensive explanation covering all components of JIRA 7, such as JIRA Software, JIRA Core, and JIRA Service Desk.

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 and understand the customizations in detail, along with sample data for various use cases, and 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 add-on development to extend JIRA's functionality, and will give insights into building applications on top of JIRA using the REST API. Various aspects of migration from other tools using CSV files will also be discussed. This book has a separate section on implementation of the JIRA Service Desk application, which is a very popular add-on for support requests and the ticketing system.

The implementation of the Scrum and Kanban techniques along with Agile reports, will be discussed as well. We will take a look at the Groovy script, which is a great tool that empowers JIRA administrators with tremendous flexibility. Additionally, 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 to help you find out what went wrong and how to fix it.