E-Book Overview
One advantage of using JIRA for issue tracking, bug tracking, or project management is the ability to extend this tool with hundreds of plugins from the JIRA community. In this concise book, software toolsmith Matt Doar—the author of Practical JIRA Administration—shows you how to create and maintain your own JIRA plugins to meet the specific needs of a project. This book uses detailed examples to clarify some of the more confusing aspects of JIRA plugins, and serves as an ideal supplement to the extensive documentation already available. - Use JIRA’s Plugin SDK, and learn several aspects common to all plugins - Create your own custom field type, using a JIRA plugin - Delve into advanced aspects of custom field plugins, and discover how searching for values in custom fields works - Create JIRA plugins to use with workflows, and learn about conditions, validators, and post-functions - Store data using the PropertySet interface and the Active Objects plugin - Upgrade a plugin and upload it to Atlassian Plugin Exchange (PAC)
E-Book Content
If we had told people we were going to build a new bug tracker, they would have told us we were completely nuts. A little research into the market would tell you that there are scores, maybe hundreds, of potential competitors, from mega-expensive corporate systems and free open source projects, to on-demand software-as-a-service applications and homegrown tools purpose built to do one thing and do it well. And then there’s Microsoft Excel, the all-in-one list builder and charting tool, which is still incredibly popular among small software teams. Had we considered the massive competition out there, we may have never created JIRA. Fortunately for us, we had some naïveté in our favour, and no one told us not to do it. We built JIRA to help us track our own consulting business, which is what Atlassian was in 2001, and in 2002 it became a fullfledged product. There’s two reasons JIRA was successful: an unexpected business model and its flexible architecture. In 2002, Atlassian’s sales model was unlike any other business-to-business software tools. It wasn’t free like an open source project, but it wasn’t expensive either like products from big corporations. It didn’t require any professional services to use. And there were no sales people. It caused some confusion in the market. Can you help us set up an evaluation? Um, just download it and try it. How can we make changes to the license agreement? You can’t. It’s one size fits all. How much for a support agreement? It’s included. Free. Can I send you a purchase order? Sure, or you can use your credit card. A credit card? To purchase enterprise software? Of course, JIRA’s popularity is more than a price point and business model. Most of the developers who started working on JIRA in 2003 are still at Atlassian today, building atop one of the most feature-rich and flexible issue trackers available. Depending on which company is using it, JIRA has been called a bug tracker, issue tracker, defect tracker, task tracker, project management system, or help desk system. It’s used by waterfall and agile development teams. It’s used by some of the largest corporations in the world to help build their biggest products, and some people use it to manage their personal cross country moves. The permissions system has allowed JIRA to work for both private and public-facing projects. An ecosystem has been built up around JIRA. As of the time of writing this foreword, there are 273 commercial and open source plugins to JIRA on the Atlassian Plugin Exchange, and hundreds of other integrations built by companies for in-house use or by vendors who sell complementary products. We’re extremely excited for Matt’s book, too. Matt has been a terrific partner who has built custom integrations for JIRA, extending it far and beyond. In some ways, this book is