Experiences with JIRA

17 Feb 2005

At work we’ve been toying with the idea of replacing Bugzilla with something a little more flexible, nicer looking, and easier to use.

I’ve been meaning to look into JIRA for some time, having come across it many times in the oss world.

So today I decided to spend 15 minutes and sign-up and download the Professional version of JIRA. Nice sign-up process, didn’t even ask for my company ph
# and address. Hopefully that means that i won’t get annoying sales people calling 30 days from now.

Decided to download the entire package and deploy it with its pre-packed tomcat instance and hsql. All went well.

Within 10 minutes of downloading I had a working installation of JIRA. The next step was to see how difficult it would be to migrate our existing bugzilla
content. Quick google search, piece of cake, JIRA provides built-in support for that. I was expecting some offline tool that I would run to do the dat
a conversion, nice touch to see it built into the application.

So now, I’ve got it all installed, I think I’ve given it my blessing as a cool system to work with and I have passed it off to the bug keepers for their i
nput. The idea is to hopefully be able to extend the software enough to easily support bug tracking, feature requests, etc for fairly large and diverse pr
ojects.

I assume I’ll get buy in on the system, and there are probably other features that I would like to check out myself. I notice some CVS integration, so I’l
l have to do a bit of reading on that.

Anyways, just thought I would share my comments on JIRA after spending a bit of time installing and experimenting with it. Dead simple registration and i
nstallation process.