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Using JIRA for Purchase Requests
A lot of people has the misconception that JIRA is used purely as a Bug Tracker. In fact, it can be used for many other purposes due to the key features (such as searching, dashboards, email notifications, workflows, permissions, issue types) provided by an Issue Tracker.
Whenever there is an item required (e.g. printer cartridges) or wished (e.g. OSIM uDivine), the person will create a new Wish in our Wishing Well project in JIRA.
The wish will be reviewed and fulfilled depending on the need, cost, urgency and usefulness. Periodically, we will review outstanding wishes as part of our Office Improvement Project.
OSIM uDivine
The good thing about using JIRA is that all wishes remains tracked so that we don’t miss out any of them. Wishers can also find out on the status of their wishes by logging into JIRA. And now, we welcome Well-wishers to come in to grant our wish for an Osim uDivine.
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Book Review: JIRA 5.x Developer Cookbook
I was very happy to get the invitation to do a book review for the latest edition of the JIRA 5.x Development Cookbook.
While I do not know Jobin (the author) personally, he has been participating activiely in the JIRA developers’ community from sharing tips in blog posts to answering fellow developers’ questions in the Developer Forum.
So when he published the first edition of the JIRA Developer Cookbook, I ordered a copy for myself. It was a worthwhile buy. The book was well organized and catered to readers who are new to JIRA development to experienced developers trying to hunt for new tricks.
New developers are led through the Plugin Development Process (Chapter 1) and Understanding the Plugin Framework (Chapter 2). For those very experienced, the chapter on Useful Recipes (Chapter 11) gave me new ideas on how certain things can be done more effectively.
This latest edition revises those sections with up-to-date information for JIRA 5.
In addition, new sections are added to elaborate on certain concepts (e.g. Types of plugin modules and Architecture explained, …) and introduce new stuff (e.g. FastDev, Issue Link Renderers, ….).
For those who are interesting to start developing their own JIRA plugins, this book will be a useful jumpstart and reference.
Bonus: From now till 10th July 2013, 2 lucky participants who post comment on their expectations of the book at the JTricks’ blog post will get a chance to win a copy of the JIRA 5.x Developer Cookbook.
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Modern. Fast. Mobile. Simple. JIRA 6
We have just upgraded our own JIRA instance to the latest version of 6.0.1 over the last weekend. And this week, our team members are giving positive feedback with the new features in JIRA 6.
Fresh Look
The JIRA interface has been revamped significantly according to the Atlassian Design Guidelines. Initially, there is a slight learning curve trying to find the buttons and links. After a while, we find that it is easier to find information and do common tasks.
Detailed View
The newly introduced Detailed View is one of my favourite feature. Now, it is much easier to work with set of issues without having to switching between Issue View and Issue Navigator. This really saves a lot of time.
JIRA Mobile
While it has been possible to view JIRA on my iPhone previously, the new mobile view for JIRA make it easier to use JIRA on the go. The interface is finger friendly for common tasks and is comparable to a native mobile app. And the best thing – it is free.
More…
For other features, please refer either to the JIRA 6.0 release notes or the video below
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Why People Choose JIRA
A picture tells a thousand words on why JIRA is used by nearly 20,000 teams, spanning 115 countries around the globe. The tool that makes a difference.
For more details, you can refer to this blog post – Make Growth Easy: Why People Choose JIRA 6
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Improving productivity by encouraging suggestions from the ground
One of the best ways for improving the productivity of the company is to get suggestions from the employees. This is because they will be able to identify the tasks and processes that is causing them more work and time.
However, as shown in the video below, most employees are less prone to voicing out their suggestions. This is more obvious with the Asian culture. Another common reason is because they feel their suggestions are not followed up.
There are a few ways to encourage them
- Giving recognition to those who provided good suggestions
- Follow up on the good suggestions
- Provide them with an easy platform to submit their suggestions
- Allow them to vote on suggestions
- Allow them to comment and refine on their suggestions
- Let them know why their suggestions are not adopted eventually
For existing JIRA users, this can be easily done by creating a new project with an Suggestion issue type. Fellow team members can come in to comment and vote on those suggestions that can benefit them.
The manager can also enforce a simple workflow to track whether the suggestion is under review, approved or implemented. He can also view statistics via the JIRA dashboards.
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Atlassian Goes Social with JIRA 5
Do you know that JIRA is used by more than 70% of the Fortune 100 companies? And the most popular issue tracker is improving itself with more useful features in the latest release of JIRA 5.
The focus of this issue is to improve how people communicate with JIRA and to make life easier by providing better integration with other systems.
The key features introduced in JIRA 5 are:
- Sharing & Mentions – Mention another user with the ‘@’ symbol to trigger an email notification together with your comments
- Search Change History – You can now build new searches to find issues with a change status, assignee and even specify when it happened or by whom
- Remote issue links – You can link your JIRA issues to issues from another JIRA site, Confluence page or even any web page URL
- JIRA to JIRA issue copy – A new (beta) plugin you can use to copy issues from a JIRA site to another JIRA site
- Improved Activity streams – Activity stream can now show external activity from another Atlassian application (e.g. Confluence)
- New Email Handler Wizard – A new wizard to configure email handlers for creating issues or comments from email messages
- and many more
Check out the video summary of the new features in the video below
Likewise, you can also check out the official release notes
To commemorate this launch, we also prepared a video edition of screenshots of JIRA sites on the Internet.
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100 Sites Powered By JIRA (Part 2) – How to jazz up your JIRA site
This blog post is a continuation of last week’s blog post on well designed JIRA sites.
100% JIRA (Part 2)View more presentations from Akeles Consulting.Based on our recent survey, we summarized a few tips on how you can jazz up your JIRA site.
- Logo – A logo helps to establish your identity and branding. The size of the logo should be between 50 to 90 pixels tall to be sufficiently big and yet allow enough working space on the screen. It is also possible to use a banner graphic as a logo too.
- Header Background Color – Try to use the same header background colour as your logo’s background color. You can use a color picker tool like Colorzilla.
- Navigation Bar Background Color – Likewise the navigation bar background color should use a different shades of the same color. The navigation bar text color can be changed to white or black to match the chosen color.
- Introduction Gadget – A short writeup to introduce the purpose and usage of the site to first-time users will be useful. Links to a quick guide or contact email address will even be better.
- Gadgets colour – The color of the gadgets in the system dashboard should ideally match with the navigation bar background colour
- Links to other sites – Some organizations will add links to other auxiliary sites like their corporate website or wiki. This enables the users to surf to other sites easily within all the JIRA pages.
A good design helps to establish a corporate branding and brightens up the user’s day. You can reference how other people do it with our slides and JIRA’s guide on customizing the look and feel of JIRA.
And do drop us a comment if you have revamped your JIRA sites or come across any well designed JIRA sites. We love to share it with the rest.
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100 Sites Powered By JIRA (Part 1)
Have you ever wondered
- Who uses JIRA?
- What are they using JIRA for?
- What content do they put on the main dashboards?
- How do they jazz up the look of JIRA for their users?
We got curious one day and ended up with lots of screenshots of nicely designed JIRA sites. And the best way to inspire more people to jazz up their sites and make JIRA more user-friendly is to show them how other folks are doing it. Hence, we decided to share 100 sites from the set.
This week, we present the first 50 sites. We will put up the second half in next week together with some tips on jazzing up your JIRA site.
100% JIRA (Part 1)View more presentations from Akeles ConsultingShare this post
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JIRA 4.4 Released: Manage Workflow & Projects with ease
JIRA 4.4 is full of new features and improvements to simplify work and increase productivity. The interfaces have designed to make it faster and easier to find the information you need and make changes to your projects quickly.
Activity Streams
The Activity Stream has had a makeover. As well as looking prettier, it now lets you vote, start watching or comment on an issue with a single click
Workflow Designer
The built-in visual workflow designer makes editing workflow fast, simple, and fun! Check out the video to see the visual workflow designer in action.
New administration interface
The new project-centric admin interface makes it easy to see which fields, screens, permissions, and notifications are associated with a particular project, so even new administrators can make any changes needed quickly.
It’s the first day of release, and we have heard administrators telling us that they are going to upgrade to 4.4 because they think the new screens can help them and their end-users.
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The challenges of bug reporting during new system rollout
One of success factors in rolling out new IT systems is to make sure that bugs are identified and fixed quickly to minimise the impact to the business.
However there are a few key challenges to doing that
- users are frustrated
- on reporting the bugs and explaining it to the IT team
- their feedback are not acknowledged
- the IT team spends a lot of time
- understanding what the bug reported is about
- gathering additional details for them to identify the bug
- the bugs raised are not tracked and fixes
- the programmer forgot to log the bug from the phone calls/emails
- a lot of time is spent on clarifying the bugs instead of fixing them
That’s why I was impressed by a company whose IT department took the initiative to insert a “Give feedback” link under their help menu for all their systems. By clicking on it, a window will pop up for the user to key in his idea/bug report. And then the feedback will be emailed back to the system administrator.
According to them, they wanted to help the end-users to give feedback to them to improve the system.
Atlassian’s Bonfire gave me an idea to refine this bug reporting process for web-based applications
- User identifies a bug
- User click the button on their browser
- A snapshot of the current screen is taken
- User marks out the error and key in a short description of their feedback
- When the user click on the send button, the bug is logged directly to the bug-tracker
- The system details and the time of error are also captured automatically
- The bug will appear in the activity stream of their IT team’s dashboard
- The IT manager will be able to have the latest statistics and status on the bug reported via JIRA
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- users are frustrated
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