by Daniel Luebke (@danieljluebke)
Administration of an issue tracking system can be a tall task. LinkedIn has more than 5,000 users and 2,000 engineers accessing the project manager each day. The very large JIRA instance has more than half a million issues, over 1000 custom fields and 200 workflows. Numbers like these make thoughtful planning and administration of their JIRA instance more than important to project success, it's critical. So how does such a massive implementation of JIRA stay running optimally?
Check out this video of author Matt Doar of ServiceRocket (book: Practical JIRA Administration) joining Dave McCutcheon of LinkedIn.
The Challenge of Large Scale Bug Tracking
Initially LinkedIn was without a single, full-time JIRA admin. In fact, about fifty admins were a part of a JIRA user group, creating their own workflows, scripts, add-ons, templates, and more. Despite their best efforts, an enormous amount of unexpected changes were seen. In the words of Dave, "the system was becoming unstable".
What's more, JIRA was integrated with at least a dozen other systems. This led to special considerations with yearly upgrades that were occurring at the time. Despite this challenge, LinkedIn was able to complete major upgrades with next-to no downtime.
Full Video:
3 More Strategies for Large Scale JIRA Administration
1. Give it the appearance of simplicity
Ordinary users don't need to see projects, fields or issue types that don't apply to them.
Tip: Use schemes to make older projects read-only or hidden. P
2. Don't surprise people
Changes are hard to adjust to, especially when they're unforeseen!
Tip: Create custom screens rather than using the default screen to avoid "suprise fields"
3. Use JIRA to track JIRA
This may sound intuitive and it should be natural, but many large instances fail to fully utilize the metatracking abilities of JIRA.
Tip: Use a Kanban Agile board to track work
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