David McCutcheon • LinkedIn Matt Doar • ServiceRocket Large Scale JIRA Administration
Transcript
1. Large Scale JIRA Administration David McCutcheon LinkedIn
Matt Doar ServiceRocket
2. JIRA and LinkedIn SOME CONTEXT OUR JIRA JOURNEY Y O U R TA K
E A W AY S
3. Behind the Scenes JIRA Git, Subversion Artifactory Ant,
gradle Many local tools About 15 people
4. What do we use JIRA for? JIRA replaces email and
spreadsheets Engineering issues bugs Operations tasks IT helpdesk,
HR helpdesk, Accounts helpdesk Purchasing Data recording for
automated tests (starting)
5. Its corporate glue
6. JIRA at LinkedIn SOME CONTEXT OUR JIRA JOURNEY Y O U R TA K
E A W AY S
7. We have more than 500K issues 1000 custom fields 200
workflows And 10K LDAP users and groups ... who all want their JIRA
their way
8. Too many administrators
9. Leads to unexpected changes Lots of changes to JIRA are
requested More than we can handle For a while we gave out admin
privileges like free candy That makes JIRA unstable
10. New features? Its upgrade time!
11. Upgrades happen once a year JIRA is integrated with at
least a dozen other systems, testing needs coordination Lots of
email template changes exist There are many JavaScript snippets in
field descriptions Its hard work!
12. JIRA Spam
13. Email - a necessary evil People need to know about changes
They want to know in minutes not hours But they cant handle the
volume anyway Neither can our mail server sometimes
14. We got help. Went to an Atlassian User Group Met people
from ServiceRocket (aka CustomWare) Theyre a local Atlassian
Platinum Expert Matt Doar works for them and onsite for us
15. JIRA at LinkedIn SOME CONTEXT OUR JIRA JOURNEY Y O U R TA K
E A W AY S
16. Growth Where do we go from here? Federated JIRA instances
is the current plan Archiving would be even better since SOX
prevents deleting issues Use schemes to make some older projects
readonly or hidden Provide a simple set of scheme choices for
project admins
17. TA K E AWAY S Growth Takeaways Create custom screens rather
than using the default screen to avoid surprise fields Use custom
issue type screens, since the default issue type scheme changes as
new types are added Prefer roles over groups in schemes so you can
delegate to project administrators
18. Governance Chaos grows with the number of administrators
For any tool you need at least one admin plus a spare Double digits
denotes danger JIRAs project Administrator role is the way to go
But set expectations to avoid frustrating project
administrators
19. Make JIRA your metatracker
20. Whats a metatracker? Its where you track issues about the
issue tracker Use a project to create issues for changes to JIRA
Use a Kanban Agile board to track work Handle the small Tasks every
day Larger requests can be Epic issues
21. Upgrading a large JIRA Lots of planning and testing
Thoroughly prepare the list of tasks Testing is assigned to project
leads and owners of other integrated systems Must upgrade in
staging to be able to test Test issue create and edit, attachments,
all status changes, searches, dashboards and all add-ons
22. That isnt just for JIRA
23. TA K E AWAY S Upgrade Takeaways Document every file change
for the next time Version control may be even more useful than
automated deployment Use #include to minimize changes to standard
email templates Avoid custom JavaScript in field
configurations
24. Is Email even the right tool?
25. Outgoing Email [ J I R A ] ( S U M M I T- 1 2 3 ) Yo u h a
v e m o r e t h i n g s t o d o Monitor the length of the mail
queue Some problems are due to long timeouts Some may be due to
rate limiting at the mail server Best practice is to use
authentication when sending but not always
26. Incoming Email JIRA reading email from many people and apps
Poll for email less often than once a minute if you have many
aliases and a few mailboxes Tell people what JIRA expects in an
email, e.g. Subject, From address With more than a dozen projects
receiving email use the JEMH add-on instead
27. TA K E AWAY S Email Takeaways Use an email address
dedicated to JIRA, with no people using it directly Regularly check
the JIRA log for problems with contacting your email server Check
for subscriptions to groups Check user has chosen to receive email
about their own changes
28. A Few Good Ideas Use a subscription to find dodgy
workflows: status != Closed and resolution is not empty Having a
consistent way of naming JIRA schemes really makes maintenance much
easier, e.g. Project X : Bug : Create Screen If an administration
needs to be automated or fast, try Jamie Echlins Script Runner
add-on first
29. TA K E AWAY Were Nearly Done JIRA does 80% of what is
wanted out of the box This leads to rapid success Getting the next
10% for an enterprise is more work, but is definitely possible
30. Its corporate glue
31. Thank you! Matt Doar [email protected] David
McCutcheon LinkedIn