Learning is an Art

After looking around for a while for a review of JIRA 4.0 , I didn’t found much of stuff needed seems like people are not talking about it but than I thought lets give JIRA 4.0 much needed review and probably I would be able to help someone and vent out some of my liking and frustrations as one of customware employee and JIRA fan replied to me on twitter

I want to start on happy note so lets start with whats so cool about JIRA 4.0….obvious answer by any big fan will be JIRA gadgets, yes I would say nodding my head in affirmation, gadgets are pretty cool no doubt about them but Atlassian big fat claim that it can work in any social container and any other gadget will work in JIRA’s container is only partly true may be due to some container specific thing or what ever may be the reason for same.

2nd coolest thing is JQL it stands for JIRA Query language, please keep in mind I am calling these things cool and cool is not always the business case, so whats so special about JQL, it allows you to write SQL like queries from with JIRA, which actaully removed alot of or may be all JIRA’s limitation for filtering issues on criteria, now filters in JIRA are much more powerful than ever before thanks to JQL.

I can not control my self and I want to move on to what’s so bad, kindly note my point I am calling bad not uncool to affirm my point that cool is not the business case, first of all the current licensing model simply sucks what costed you $4k earlier now you even get that after paying $8k double appreciation in price in matter of one release, I don’t think any of the Atlassian customers would have ever imagined this catastroph it’s simply ridiculous.

Moving on other perils of JIRA 4.0 is the migration path from 3.13, Atlassian is a very open company they provide alot of documentation helping you in writing plugins and customization you want and than they screw you by breaking the API, I am not a big fan of M$ but one thing I always liked about them is they never break the contract with the developer old API’s always stay. What Atlassian did was just one release and few API’s were gone with the wind without even a single intimation of them being deprecated, I did analysis for efforts required to migrate from JIRA 3.13 to 4.0 for one of my customers and results were not so pleasing from him as they heavily customized JIRA and written around 27 odd plugins and to my surprise none of them worked out of the box in JIRA 4.0 what a crap, I suggested better not to migrate but than Atlassian will stop supporting 3.13 soon than they will be in much bigger soup.

One pending feature for ages better ldap support their strategy on this is pretty clear they want to sell crowd to you and will not add this feature in JIRA, every user comes and reads documentation that it’s planned some where in the road map and buys JIRA in hope he will see it soon but I didn’t got to see it in last 4 yrs , this issue has been recently estimated, I hope it gets completed in this decade, Atlassian has been very prudent in suggesting it’s customers to use crowd for ldap, I liked the business model but I hate it as customer and end user.

I can go on venting my anger on Atlassian but I don’t think they have any concerns about their licensing as alot of people are trapped and they can’t get out of it even they want to, my simple request to Atlassian and all other vendors if you expose API’s to developers than it’s your reponsibility to keep it intact, otherwise better not expose API’s.

PS: Alot of people might ask why I am reacting so late, fact is that this post was in my drafts for quite sometime now I was just not getting impetus to finish it today I had to write something but didn’t had a topic so completed this post

Yeah you heard me right today Atlassian JIRA 4.0 was officially released after doing many beta’s and release candidate…I was expecting that it will take people with a storm with opensocial gadget JQL and many other improvements yes it did took people with storm but for some other reasons and the reason was its licensing policy you can find details of same here and my favourite one is there reason of changing the licensing that’s really cool and pretty lame at the same time for reasons of increasing the licensing cost or changing it all together.

I really doubt the fact that any hundred people company will really like to pay $4000 JIRA and the biggest one is the Enterprise license now costs you double that is $8000 and the cherry one the cake is licensing is now based on number of active named users that means that if you have 100 users and you are now 101 ; you need to run behind Atlassian to upgrade your licenses.

I want to write more on this but may be some other lets wait and watch for reactions from other people; I will be back on this topic with more detailed analysis of pros and cons of same this was just an initial outburst.

Few days back first release candidate of JIRA 4.0 was announced that means JIRA has moved pretty closer to one of the greatest release in the history of JIRA releases; there was a mixed bag in JIRA 3.13 which people were speculating to be 4.0 at that time but Atlassian decided to mark it as 3.13 as they were planning something really big for the mega release 4.0.

Two features which look killer to me are Opensocial gadgets and JIRA query langauge; I was really wondering why Atlassian went ahead with implementing Opensocial while missing out few popular issues like ldap authentication which has been around for six years now but after pondering on thought of Opensocial  I realized that Atlassian has cooked up something really big which is not easily comprehensible in current scenario of issue trackers what I feel it has a potential to cause a paradigm shift in the way we look at issue trackers and way we use them I can smell something really big coming out of it.

I would loke to end with a not to all those who have AMC to start getting ready for a Opensocial. I am also eagerly waiting for this release to happen.

For this week only, Atlassian is offering a special 5-user “starter” license of JIRA and Confluence for only $5 each. They’re calling it the Atlassian Stimulus Package and it’s a great way of supporting small teams and small businesses in this difficult economic environment. Best of all, they will be donating every penny to charity, so please help them spread the word!

The Atlassian Foundation is donating all proceeds to Room to Read, a charity that helps the world’s future entrepreneurs by building libraries and schools for children in developing nations.

Get all the details at www.atlassian.com/starter. Hurry, offer ends on 24 April 2009.

Please spread the word as much as possible.

I would like to congratulate Atlassian for the great effort.

I am to used to searching everything from Firefox search providers box on the left hand side; I was getting fed up when I type some issue id for my local jira and not getting any results so I decided to develop a search provider for jira quick search and to my surprise it was easier than I expected; hence I put ins some effort in working it out and I want to save effort of people who might be interested in doing same.
We will create an xml file based on following page creating open search plugin for Firefox

Edit the fields in bold according to your setup and save the file in your <Firefox installation directory>\searchplugins\jira.xml

Restart your browser and check the list of search providers; you will see a new search provider with name you specified in tag short name.

The above concept can be extended for searching any other intranet side through Firefox.

Enjoy searching Jira issues; post me back if you have some issue getting it working.

Before starting on this I would like to than Atlassian team for starting personal licenses for users. I would say its really a big thing for me as it saves me a lot time going to atlassian site and downloading license after every one month.

So now what do I do with my personal Jira installation :

Tracking my own progress on things: My jira Installation has project name learning which I have components as shown below so the differnet sources of my learning has become components of my jira project learning and not forget the title of my Jira installation is Personal life Jira

Personal Jira Components

Similarly versions are quarters of year and I create few Jira issues for each components each quarter like say I have a traget of reading two books each quarter, write ten blog posts each quarter; Jira helps in setting my personal goals.

We all agree that putting down things on paper or in genral documenting it somehwere helps alot especially putting down what we want to do and what we are suppose to do. People might say Jira might be to big application for managing personal taks but in my humble opinion its not about tool its more about the intent.

Developing some plugins and customization for Jira: Being a developer at heart I was not able to refrain my self from trying my hands on Jira’s plugin development environment with so much help available its pretty easy to get started though maven may suck you at start but once set it works as bread and butter.

So Jira as whole as impacted my learning process; I would like to thank Atlassian for providing such a nice tool and great licensing options.

Disclaimer: I am not associated with Atlassian by any means.