This document provides tips and best practices for administering JIRA. It discusses perspectives from Atlassian Support and from administering JIRA at Polycom. Key tips include using roles instead of groups, using workflow drafts, limiting custom fields and administrators, testing changes on staging instances, and documenting all changes made to the JIRA configuration. The document also provides an overview of the JIRA installation at Polycom and tips for migrating issues from other systems into JIRA.

1. JIRA Administrivia
Golden Tips for Making JIRA Hum
Peter White (Atlassian) & Joanna Thurmann (Polycom)‫‏‬

2. Agenda
Atlassian Support Perspective (pw)‫‏‬
o Know your JIRA
o Administration tips
o Resources
Tips from the trenches (jt)‫‏‬
o JIRA at Polycom
o Real-world best practices

3. Peter White…
Atlassian Support Engineer

4. JIRA Works
most problems with JIRA are configuration related
Having problems?
o Documentation – all in one place
o Forums
o Knowledge Base
o Atlassian Support
Avoid these problems!
o Staging server
o TEST TEST TEST!

5. But I just want to tell the time!
then you need to understand how it works

6. JIRA is very flexible
JIRA is very complicated
Use simple configurations
o Consistent naming
Limited number of administrators
o Outsource project administration with roles
Document your changes
Don’t get frustrated
o Support Engineers learn new things about
JIRA all the time and we use it every day!

7. JIRA is Well Documented
there is waaaay too much to read about JIRA
Where do you start?
o JIRA Quickstart guide
o JIRA 101
What next? Topics to understand:
o Backups
o Workflows
o Roles & Groups
o Plugins

8. Tip#1: Turn off XML Backup
Use native database tools
They are faster, and guaranteed
consistent
During XML backups, the database is
not locked

9. Tip#2: Use Roles
Minimizes the number of schemes
Allows delegation of administration
Use Scheme Tools to migrate from
groups to roles

10. Tip#3: Workflow Drafts
Pre-draft workflow change updates
all issues
With drafts usually only the
workflow is changed (Faster!)‫‏‬

11. Tip#4: Useful Plugins
Useful plugins you may not know about:
JIRA Suite Utilities
JIRA Groovy Plugin
Visualizing JIRA Workflows
SU Plugin

12. Tip#5: Customizing text in JIRA
Use the JIRA translation file to change
wording
Modify the velocity templates for email
notifications

13. Tip#6: Silent Killers
Subscriptions (to groups eg JIRA-users)‫‏‬
Messages in POP accounts that don’t
go away / Concurrent services
Forgotten XML backup service

14. Tip#7: Quick java performance boosts
-XX:+UseParallelOldGC
-XX:+ConcMarkSweepGC

15. Resources
Guides to read
o Creating issues and comments from email
o Troubleshooting issues and comments from email
o JIRA Workflows
Bug and feature database
Most popular feature requests

16. Administrivia:
Tips from the Trenches
Joanna Thurmann
JIRA Systems Administration June 1, 2009
POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL

17. Polycom is the global leader in telepresence, video, and voice
solutions
Polycom allows you to connect anytime, anyplace and with any
device in a virtual experience as natural as being there
www.polycom.com
joanna.thurmann@polycom.com – JIRA Systems Administrator
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18. 3 ½ yrs old
Single global instance
~24x7
Migrated from 7 other systems
Internal & External
• 130,000+ issues
• 120 projects
• 340 custom fields
• 80 workflows
• 3900 users (~300 concurrent)
• 340 groups
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19. Buy Enterprise Edition
Determine ‘must-have’ vs ‘nice-to-have’ features
Get familiar with the JIRA ‘wish-list’
Know JIRA limitations
Develop standards
Allow play in a sandbox
Good Training
Do Barn raising* – worked for us
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20. Search Limitations
 Our Workaround: Custom dashboards, Custom field search
page, Export to Excel
Permission Limitations
 Our Workaround: workflow transition screens & action conditions
No subcomponents or subversions
 Our Workaround: cascaded select fields
Cannot edit or effective-date custom field options:
 Our workaround: ‘archived’ field equivalents, bulk edits
Cannot rename users or groups after creation
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23. Embrace ‘brute-force’
Use available methods
Avoid SQL inserts
Migrate open-issues only
Create links to old system
Do user mapping before you migrate
Get a good Atlassian development partner (CustomWare)
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25. Setup 1-2 staging instances
Inspect the JIRA logs for errors or warnings
Add log4j.properties entries to audit execution of plugins
On-demand Training - write a guide, record a session
User Communication
SQL warnings* – don’t do what we did
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26. What to document?
 Everything
Why document?*
 The last JIRA upgrade at Polycom would have sunk without it
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28. Standardize
Less is more
Custom Fields - Limit Context & Reuse
Determine Product Structure
Use Project Roles – e.g. Polycom Partner access
Understand the RESOLUTION field* – we didn’t and it cost us
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30. Who system admin (2) divisional jira-administrators (12)
Why Knows the system better Knows the business better
What
Manage system fields (priorities,
Manage workflows
issue types, resolutions,
Manage components/versions
statuses)
Manage custom field values
Create Projects
Bulk operations
Manage users/groups
Create shared filters, dashboards &
Define standards group filter subscriptions
Approve plugins
Maintain permissions
Manage security
Maintain notifications
How Communicate well Train them well
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31. Use Plugins conservatively
Wait for compatible versions
Beware of leaks
Consider performance
Review JIRA logs for warnings & errors
Beware of potential end-of-life
Beware:
Once you’ve deployed a plugin,
it’s hard to pull it out
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32. Allocate sufficient memory
Buy adequate hardware
Consider JIRA Clustering & MultiSite solutions from WANdisco
Archiving
JIRA Environment at Polycom:
HP ProLiant DL580 G4, 4 x 3.4 GHz Dual Core processors
8 GB of RAM (3.5 for Java, 2 for SQL Server)
Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition 64-bit
SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition
JIRA 3.13.3, JDK 1.6
Back to Contents
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34. http://www.customware.net/
CustomWare is an Atlassian Partner providing rapid implementation,
training and support to Atlassian customers worldwide
CustomWare worked on and offsite
Strong Enterprise Integration background, understanding of Web
Services, Siebel etc.
Fast, reliable & thorough – they *really* know the Atlassian products
Have a large team and 7 x 24 support
Helped us with some complex custom Bugzilla migrations
Have lots of plugins for JIRA and Confluence, including Salesforce.com
integration for both products.
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35. Clustering balances workload across servers at a single site over a LAN
MultiSite balances workload across multiple sites over a WAN and
resolve WAN latency issues
Both solutions can be implemented in combination
Provides self-healing & eliminates risk in disaster recovery
Back to Contents
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36. Schedule regular Java restarts - to clear memory
Schedule reindexes – since index exceptions can occur
Run integrity checker regularly and fix errors
Schedule multiple backup services to different locations
Do secondary database-based backup
Backup attachments
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37. Search Limitations:
 Limited Boolean search (4.0)
 cannot search for empty /null fields (4.0)
 cannot search for multiple values in a cascaded select field
 cannot combine search results
 cannot search for components & versions across projects even if the values
are the same
 can only search on custom fields across projects if the prj context is the same
 dashboards and canned reports only get you so far
Permission Limitations
 No field-level permissions
 No permissions per state
 No permissions per issue type
 Can’t hide time-tracking, work log or change history (e.g. for external JIRAs)
 Polycom Workaround: workflow transition screens, workflow action conditions
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38. Custom Fields
 Limit Context by Project/Issue Type
 Reuse fields (use project contexts)
 Don’t put every custom field in a Global context: it clutters the Issue
Navigator
Understand the RESOLUTION field !!!!
 When an issue has a Resolution field set, JIRA considers it Closed. This
affects preset filters and canned reports/queries
 set Resolution field ONLY when issue is considered closed (e.g. on
Workflow Transition Screen)
 Consider a custom plugin to transfer ‘intermediate’ resolution field to
system Resolution field (we run a custom plugin from CustomWare)
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39. Determine Product Structure.
 many small projects (i.e. one per product) VS.
 fewer bigger projects with more components, versions, & cascading
select custom fields to group issues by ProductLine~Product and
Release~Build
You can denote the product information on an issue in these various ways
 Project name itself
 Components field
 Version field
 Custom fields: single and multiple select
 Cascading select field
 The first 3 can be managed by project admin. The last 2 can only be
managed by sysadmin
 Limitations on cascading selects: not displayed on charts/graphs, cannot
search on multiple values in cascading select field
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40. haveasec.com/summit
SURVEY!!