One of my primary daily tasks at Revium is to record and track bugs and requests from client who experience problems or have questions about web applications we have developed for them. This can be a time consuming task and up to now we have used different ‘Issue registers’ to assist with this undertaking. Although this formalized the process to a certain extend it had its flaws and shortcomings and as a company we therefore started investigating alternatives registers to make administration and tracking easier.
One of the prime candidates was JIRA – a comprehensive bug tracking, issue tracking and project management software tool. We trialed the free 30 evaluation and I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of flexibility the tool gave us to monitor bugs and enhancement requests. The filters allow you to do quite powerful searches to identify issues in various stages of our workflow which make progress extremely visible and easy to monitor. Gone are the days of writing hundreds of emails informing clients when issues are ready for testing or when they have been implemented: JIRA allows you to modify the default email notification scheme and create custom notification schemes for clients which effectively automate sending update notifications.
Furthermore JIRA gives the administrator power to control user access levels which neatly hides all functionality we do not want clients to use. Setting up projects, groups and users are straight forward once you understand the relationship between these elements and JIRA provides flexibility to add customised fields to tailor projects according to each client’s individual needs.
Earlier this week the finally purchased a JIRA Professional Commercial License and we are in the process of introducing the system to the other BA’s, Project Managers and developers who will be working with the product. During the coming week project leads will be configuring JIRA for all clients they are looking after and I suspect that we will roll it out late next week. Most of the user and implementation documentation has been completed and although we still have to find some minor workarounds for small problems I look forward to having one central register which will undoubtedly make my day job so much easier!
Read more about JIRA here.
Related posts:
- New Issue Register
- Launch of the “WEB Determinations” project
- Tenders – Good or Evil?
- New Products Launch and Redesign of Simply Energy website
- Release Management
Tags: jira
