By ServiceRocket's Chief Toolsmith Matt Doar, author of the O'Reilly book Practical JIRA Administration

In the last ten years I’ve worked on hundreds of JIRA instances and every one has had at least one add-on installed. Even back when they were still known as plain old "plugins". There are hundreds to choose from at the Atlassian Marketplace but which are the ones I keep coming back to, which ones do I recommend that our customers install? Read on.

The add-ons listed here are mostly zero cost and available in JIRA OnDemand.

1. JIRA Toolkit

This is probably the oldest add-on out there but it still has plenty of life in it. You get Message fields to make your bug screens clearer, the Participants field to see who is active in your JIRA, and lots of other things that Atlassian created for their own support team way back when. The documentation could do with a refresh but it's free and consistently useful.

• If I want a Last Comment field I prefer the ServiceRocket JIRA Utilities add-on since it's more configurable.

2. JIRA Suite Utilities (JSU)

This splendid collection of workflow conditions, validators and post-functions is what makes JIRA workflows really useful in the wild. JSU is currently well-maintained by Beecom, a Swiss Atlassian Expert. This add-on also has the original Issues Transition tab, which nicely summarizes all the status changes that have happened to an issue.

• A couple of great add-ons that often appear along with JSU are the JIRA Misc Workflow Extensions and JIRA Misc Custom Fields, both from Innovalog. However, these are no longer zero cost and are not available for OnDemand.

3. Script Runner

Script Runner is the automation tool of choice for JIRA. Originally created by London JIRA expert Jamie Echlin because he wasn't allowed to restart his JIRA to install any plugins, it has developed into a full Groovy and Jython scripting tool. You can use the canned scripts it comes with or develop your own, accessing all of the internal JIRA API. You can create custom workflow scripts, JQL functions, custom fields, listeners and more.

Since you can do so much with this tool including accessing JIRA's own installation files, it's a good job it's well secured. Still, it's unlikely to ever be made available for OnDemand.

What are the JIRA add-ons that you couldn’t do without?

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