My JIRA DashBoard
Monday, June 16th, 2008I am a big fan of JIRA, a nice and powerful issues tracker that was created by the aussies at Atlassian. Part of the reason why IzPack joined Codehaus is that they provide a first-class infrastructure for their projects that includes a JIRA instance.
One thing that is highly important when you manage a JIRA project is to take some time to set-up a customized dashboard.
A customized dashboard is extremely helpful to have some stats on your project and don’t loose a bit of information on important issues. Leave an issue without at least an acknowledgment that someone took notice of it and your project will get a bad reputation quickly by making unhappy users.
Here is an overview of my dashboard for IzPack at Codehaus:
The first piece of information that I like to have is a roadmap and progress bars for the upcoming releases. Just below it a created vs resolved issues graph gives me an overview of where we are going with the project handling of issues. There will always be more issues created than resolved, but what is important is to measure how the gap between them evolves over time.
I then put some fancy graphs regarding the issues. They are nice to have and certainly useful.
On the right hand of my dashboard I keep a list of important issues. Those views play a highly critical role in my case.
- I track the issues that have been assigned to me. Memory is a versatile resource
- The unassigned and unresolved issues are quite important. Those ones need to be checked, assigned, scheduled or closed quickly if invalid. Enhancements and new feature requests can stay here for a while. This should however not the case for bug reports.
- The unscheduled issues are open and not yet scheduled, but at least someone has been assigned to them.
As I am still learning JIRA, feel-free to drop suggestions on how I could be even more efficient with it 
