Using JIRA for Issue and Project Tracking Byron Chan

Usability Issues with Bugzilla Poor flow Overwhelming Certain types of searches hard (those needed for defect counts on weekly status reports) Poor flow, overwhelming, multiple search buttons (do they do the same things?), have to manually enter dates not in standard US format, hard to do certain searches (e.g. searching for bugs created in the last week, newly resolved bugs) especially as required for the defect counts on the weekly status reports 04/28/2010

Usability Issues with Bugzilla Bug search, columns bleed into each other, hard to read, hard to pick out bug severity/priorities Columns too close to each other Hard to differentiate severity and priority 04/28/2010

Tedious Project Management Project Manager has to create and update project plan and progress report weekly Hard to know project status – must ask each team member Project plan often not looked at by the other team members. It requires a lot of work on the part of the project manager. During development phase, how does the PM know what each person is doing? Can look at Subversion log but depends on how much people enter there. Often must resort to asking each developer. 04/28/2010

Use JIRA Instead Well-known issue and project tracker User-friendly interface Highly customizable Allows plugins for additional functionality Downside $4000 for academic license (unlimited users) Could purchase a $10 license (10 users) for each team 04/28/2010

JIRA Search List of search filters Grouped by category Easy date searches Standard search functionality – long list of items, flows off the page, not overwhelming (better flow than Bugzilla) Select the fields you want, grouped by sections which are expandable/collapsable For dates, can choose from a calendar, makes it easy to find bugs resolved within a period, or new bugs within a period (not easy in Bugzilla) 04/28/2010

JIRA Search Results Fields differentiated Icons/colors used Search results, columns are well-delimited, easy to read, use of color, and icons to show type, priority, and status Fields customizable Fields differentiated Icons/colors used Fields customizable 04/28/2010

Project Tracking in JIRA Put project plan in JIRA as tasks/subtasks Team members responsible for updating Easy for PM to track Team members set status, logging work done, and entering comments. 04/28/2010

JIRA Time Tracking 04/28/2010

JIRA Dashboard, good for project managers, and others too. Customizable with different widgets. Can show a lot of things—have issue statistics by priority, pie chart breaking down issues by assignee, created vs resolved graph, can have saved searches, either clicking a link to see the search results (will just show # on dashboard) or as shown here, displaying the actual results of the search. 04/28/2010

Many Other Features Integrates with source control (Subversion, CVS, others) IDE integration (Eclipse, Netbeans, others) Email threading Can import from Bugzilla Email threading – when somebody updates an issue, email gets sent as a reply to the original issue creation email. So sorting by thread makes it easy to see all the changes/comments on a particular issue. 04/28/2010

References JIRA homepage Bugzilla homepage http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ Bugzilla homepage http://www.bugzilla.org/ 04/28/2010

Questions? 04/28/2010

Backup Slides 04/28/2010

Academic Pricing Source: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing.jsp 04/28/2010