1. Large Scale JIRA Administration David McCutcheon LinkedIn Matt Doar ServiceRocket

2. JIRA and LinkedIn SOME CONTEXT OUR JIRA JOURNEY Y O U R TA K E A W AY S

3. Behind the Scenes JIRA Git, Subversion Artifactory Ant, gradle Many local tools About 15 people

4. What do we use JIRA for? JIRA replaces email and spreadsheets Engineering issues bugs Operations tasks IT helpdesk, HR helpdesk, Accounts helpdesk Purchasing Data recording for automated tests (starting)

5. Its corporate glue

6. JIRA at LinkedIn SOME CONTEXT OUR JIRA JOURNEY Y O U R TA K E A W AY S

7. We have more than 500K issues 1000 custom fields 200 workflows And 10K LDAP users and groups ... who all want their JIRA their way

8. Too many administrators

9. Leads to unexpected changes Lots of changes to JIRA are requested More than we can handle For a while we gave out admin privileges like free candy That makes JIRA unstable

10. New features? Its upgrade time!

11. Upgrades happen once a year JIRA is integrated with at least a dozen other systems, testing needs coordination Lots of email template changes exist There are many JavaScript snippets in field descriptions Its hard work!

12. JIRA Spam

13. Email - a necessary evil People need to know about changes They want to know in minutes not hours But they cant handle the volume anyway Neither can our mail server sometimes

14. We got help. Went to an Atlassian User Group Met people from ServiceRocket (aka CustomWare) Theyre a local Atlassian Platinum Expert Matt Doar works for them and onsite for us

15. JIRA at LinkedIn SOME CONTEXT OUR JIRA JOURNEY Y O U R TA K E A W AY S

16. Growth Where do we go from here? Federated JIRA instances is the current plan Archiving would be even better since SOX prevents deleting issues Use schemes to make some older projects readonly or hidden Provide a simple set of scheme choices for project admins

17. TA K E AWAY S Growth Takeaways Create custom screens rather than using the default screen to avoid surprise fields Use custom issue type screens, since the default issue type scheme changes as new types are added Prefer roles over groups in schemes so you can delegate to project administrators

18. Governance Chaos grows with the number of administrators For any tool you need at least one admin plus a spare Double digits denotes danger JIRAs project Administrator role is the way to go But set expectations to avoid frustrating project administrators

19. Make JIRA your metatracker

20. Whats a metatracker? Its where you track issues about the issue tracker Use a project to create issues for changes to JIRA Use a Kanban Agile board to track work Handle the small Tasks every day Larger requests can be Epic issues

21. Upgrading a large JIRA Lots of planning and testing Thoroughly prepare the list of tasks Testing is assigned to project leads and owners of other integrated systems Must upgrade in staging to be able to test Test issue create and edit, attachments, all status changes, searches, dashboards and all add-ons

22. That isnt just for JIRA

23. TA K E AWAY S Upgrade Takeaways Document every file change for the next time Version control may be even more useful than automated deployment Use #include to minimize changes to standard email templates Avoid custom JavaScript in field configurations

24. Is Email even the right tool?

25. Outgoing Email [ J I R A ] ( S U M M I T- 1 2 3 ) Yo u h a v e m o r e t h i n g s t o d o Monitor the length of the mail queue Some problems are due to long timeouts Some may be due to rate limiting at the mail server Best practice is to use authentication when sending but not always

26. Incoming Email JIRA reading email from many people and apps Poll for email less often than once a minute if you have many aliases and a few mailboxes Tell people what JIRA expects in an email, e.g. Subject, From address With more than a dozen projects receiving email use the JEMH add-on instead

27. TA K E AWAY S Email Takeaways Use an email address dedicated to JIRA, with no people using it directly Regularly check the JIRA log for problems with contacting your email server Check for subscriptions to groups Check user has chosen to receive email about their own changes

28. A Few Good Ideas Use a subscription to find dodgy workflows: status != Closed and resolution is not empty Having a consistent way of naming JIRA schemes really makes maintenance much easier, e.g. Project X : Bug : Create Screen If an administration needs to be automated or fast, try Jamie Echlins Script Runner add-on first

29. TA K E AWAY Were Nearly Done JIRA does 80% of what is wanted out of the box This leads to rapid success Getting the next 10% for an enterprise is more work, but is definitely possible

30. Its corporate glue

31. Thank you! Matt Doar matt.doar@servicerocket.com David McCutcheon LinkedIn