I have been using Atlassian’s JIRA for quite some time now, and have delved into coaxing it to do things that go well beyond the standard workflows shipped with it. In the interest of full and fair disclosure, I’m a huge fan of Atlassian’s tools (Confluence is a very sweet wiki indeed), and I know a good deal of developer types who also like some of their other kit (FishEye and Crucible being top choices).
Part of what makes JIRA such a strong tool is the availability of an extensive plugin collection. Although I will at some point write a more detailed account of my JIRA adventures, I did want to post some of the plugins I use quite extensively (and, at the same time, thank their developers for creating them).
- The JIRA Advanced Mail Handler is an extension of the standard JIRA email handler; while the built-in plugin works quite nicely, this one quite a bit of punch to the creation and workflow of any issue. Kudos to Daniele Raffo.
- The JIRA Calendar Plugin shows issues and versions in a calendar format based on their due date, and its produced (but not supported) by Atlassian. If you run a production environment and have changes flying in and out of the environment, this is an invaluable plugin to get a sense for what’s happening when.
- The JIRA Charting Plugin is another great addition to Atlassian’s stable of JIRA plugins. It lets you slice and dice data and present it in a sensible matter.
- The JIRA Component Watcher Plugin, written by Ray Bartham, is great when different people need to be notified of things related to components they manage in a larger project (but who are not necessarily the owners of said component).
- The JIRA Labels Plugin, for loose tagging of issues, ends up providing a decent way to organize issues and find like things later. Also by Atlanssian.
- The Jira Suite Utilities is a nice collection of workflow conditions and validators. A must have by Alexey Abashev.
Finally, and although it’s not a plugin proper, Bob Swift’s JIRA Command Line Interface is a great way to poke into JIRA for those of us who spend time with terminal windows.
