Blogging Roller

About a year ago, Mike Cannon Brookes of Atlassian contacted me and offered to provide issue tracking for the Roller Weblogger project using JIRA, Atlassian's flagship web-based issue tracking software. I'd seen JIRA in action, so I took him up on the offer immediately. Mike set up a JIRA installation for us on an Atlassian-provided server, moved our old SourceForge bug-list into the system, and handed out usernames and passwords. We got the Atlassian legendary service, yet we didn't pay a penny.

Atlassian recently released JIRA 2.4 and to help get the word out, Mike Cannon Brookes has asked me to do a little review here on Blogging Roller. I like JIRA, so this is really no problem at all. I can give you my unbiased impressions of JIRA and the new JIRA 2.4 release without fear of retribution.

The old JIRA. First, lets talk about the old JIRA. When I started using JIRA, I was impressed by the clean, attractive, and easy to use user interface. Having worked with Scopus, PRTracker, and PVCS Tracker, nice UI was not what I had come to expect from a bug tracking system. Generally, things worked as I expected that they would and I found it was easy to tweak the settings that I needed to tweak. I added the names of the Roller components (e.g. Weblog Editor, Page Management, Installation, etc.) for issue categorization. I also added the release numbers of the previous and planned Roller releases. I've been using JIRA for a year now and it has been working well for me, it doesn't get in the way, and doesn't irritate. That is high praise for software.

The new JIRA 2.4. Roller's JIRA installation is still running the old JIRA 2.3, so to review JIRA 2.4 I had to install it myself. I downloaded the new JIRA 2.4 from the Atlassian site and installed the standalone version. The standalone version comes bundled with a copy of Tomcat 4.1 and the HSQL-DB database, so there is almost no setup. All you do is unzip, run the startup script, and point your browser at http://localhost:8080. Very cool and perfect for a quick review like this. You may also install JIRA as a standard Java Web Application Archive (WAR) or Enterprise Application Archive (EAR) and Atlassian provides step-by-step instructions for all of the major Java app servers (plus Resin and Orion). After starting up Tomcat and filling out a couple of JIRA setup screens, I had JIRA 2.4 up and running.

I created a test project and a couple of issues and found no major changes in the JIRA user-interface along the way. That makes sense. JIRA 2.4 is a minor enhancement and bug fix release. The most significant new features are a new bar-chart display for issue statistics, support for customization via the Jelly XML scripting language, and some improvements in custom field support. There are a host of other improvements and fixes. JIRA 2.4 is not a ground-breaking new release; it is a more stable, new, and improved version of the JIRA.

JIRA Limitations. There are a couple of major JIRA limitations that should be mentioned. I've seen JIRA lose a couple of deals (to TeamTrack and DevTrack) because of these limitations, so I'm hoping that Atlassian will address one or both of them in the next major release. First and foremost: out-of-the-box JIRA does not support full integration with any of the major Source Code Management (SCM) systems. The extensive JIRA API and plugin service and listener appear to provide all of the hooks customers need to implement full intregration, but missing out-of-the-box SCM integration can be a deal killer. The other limitation is the workflow. The workflow that is built into JIRA cannot be altered though the UI or through the three JIRA extension mechanisms (the API, listeners, and services). You can change the names of the issue states, but you cannot change the states and transitions in the issue workflow. This can also be a deal killer as many customers are either unwilling or unable to change their processes just to please a new software package.

Overall, JIRA is a simple, easy-to-use, and very flexible web-based issue tracking system with that provides a high-level of extensibility though Java APIs, plugins, and soon a SOAP-based web services interface. Installing JIRA is very straight-forward, the default settings are reasonable, and this allows you to get up and running quickly. JIRA sports some innovative features like voting and RSS feeds for issue events, but JIRA does not try to do as much as more complex, expensive issue tracking systems like TeamTrack. JIRA has a couple of major limitations, but the JIRA pricing helps to make up for those limitations. You can get a JIRA server license that allows unlimited users for the price of a couple of TeamTrack client licenses. If you want a low-cost and highly extensible web-based issue tracker for your software project then you should take a close look at JIRA.