Atlassian
Voice of the Customer Webinar
JIRA super-sized
Joanna Thurmann
JIRA Systems Administration
December 10, 2008
Agenda
Why JIRA – before and after
Living Large / Vital Signs
JIRA Strengths / Weaknesses (at Polycom)
Best practices (deployment, project setup, sys admin, ownership)
Demo
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Polycom Customizations
Bidirectional integration with Siebel CRM
Integration Framework
JIRA Scalability
About our partner CustomWare
Q&A
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
About Polycom
Polycom is the global leader in telepresence, video, and voice
solutions
Polycom allows you to connect anytime, anyplace and with any
device in a virtual experience as natural as being there
www.polycom.com
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Before JIRA - Challenges
Too much of everything
 Multiple acquisitions in a short timeframe
 Large geographically dispersed userbase
 Varying business practices
 Plethora of tools: DevTrack, Bugzilla, Mantis, small JIRA, Test
Director, spreadsheets & emails
Resistance to change in silo organizations
Knowledge Gap
Poor Communication
Duplication
No integration
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
After JIRA
Satisfied Customers – visibility into their feature requests
Great communication (within engineering and service)
Efficient & clear processes
Transparency
Consistency
Accountability (through unified metrics)
Cost Savings
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Fewer resources to do the same job
Fewer tools
Low maintenance cost
POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Environment Overview
Single Global Instance
Accessible externally
Bug-tracking & Feature Requests
Enterprise 3.7.4 (migrating to 3.13.2 in Jan 09)
Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition 64-bit
SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition
Internal Users, Partners, Customers
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Living Large – JIRA Vital Signs
Issues = 115,000
Projects = 120
Custom Fields = 310
Workflows = 70
Total Users = 3000
Groups = 300
Growth of ~2,000 new issues / month
250 concurrent users at peak times
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
JIRA Strengths - at Polycom
Feature-rich and robust
Intuitive and user-friendly
Extensive configurability to suit varying business needs
Easy to install, support and customize
Inexpensive!
Great support from Atlassian
It just works -- ‘as advertised’
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
JIRA Weaknesses - at Polycom
Search
Permission/Security
Globalization: no local user time zones
Limitations on granularity of Product data
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No subcomponents or subversions
Cascading select field - cannot be displayed on graphs, charts or
have a multiselect searcher template
System Administration ‘hassles’
User/Group Administration
Scalability
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Best Practices – Large Deployment
“Just get them in and let them play”
Embrace ‘brute-force’ migration
Do Barn raising
Buy Enterprise Edition
Invest in ‘enterprise-worthy’ hardware and environment
Determine ‘must-have’ versus ‘nice-to-have’ features
Get familiar with the top most requested JIRA feature list
Find a good partner up front (CustomWare)
Consider scalability up-front: size grows quickly & performance and
memory can become a problem
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Best Practices – Project Setup
Develop Standards: project naming, notifications, use project roles
Pre-determine Project Structure :
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many small projects (i.e. one per product)
fewer bigger projects with more components, versions, &
cascading select custom fields to group issues by
ProductLine~Product and Release~Build
Understand the Resolution field!
Custom Fields
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Limit Context by Project/Issue Type
Reuse
POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Best Practices – System Admin
Limit schemes – use Project Roles
Don’t go crazy with plugins
Preventative Health - schedule routine restarts & reindexes
Good cop/ Bad cop - be generous on ‘standardized’ options
Pre-record training & link it in JIRA
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Best Practices – Look Who’s Driving
Who
system admin
super-users (divisional jira-admins)
Why
Knows the system better
Knows the business better
What
How
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Manage system fields
(priorities, issue types,
resolutions, statuses)
Manage workflows
Create Projects
Bulk operations
Manage users/groups
Define standards
Create shared filters & group filter
subscriptions
Approve plugins
Determine permissions
Manage security
Determine notifications
Communicate well
POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Manage components/versions
Manage custom field values
Train them well
Demo – Polycom Customizations
JIRA/Siebel Integration
Post Function to set a Group Interested-Party field based on the
Component selected during issue creation
Post Function to set Resolution based on value of a custom field
Post Function to Set Custom Fields during workflow transition
Post Function which links issues and copies Reporter & Interested
Parties to linked issue
Change Reporter during Cloning
New issue operation to send ad-hoc emails
Set Default Comment Visibility (to a group vs. “All Users” )
Custom Search Page – search custom fields by LastUpdate time
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Solution Overview: CRM / JIRA Integration
Customers
Call Center / Tech Support
Tier1
Tier2
Tier3
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Engineering
JIRA/ Siebel
Integration
Solution Detail: Siebel / JIRA Integration
Real-time integration
Siebel user clicks button to escalate Service Request to Engineering
Siebel sends XML message to JIRA
A JIRA custom plugin reads the msg, maps various system and custom
fields and creates an issue with comments
Siebel response message is presented to the user
Bidirectional updates are sent ‘on-demand’ between Siebel and JIRA
Attachments are extracted out of Siebel and put onto separate server,
accessible via custom field link in JIRA
Appropriate Notifications are sent by both systems
Java servlet over HTTP
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Scalability Goals
Improve JIRA performance – esp. remotely
Long-term stability
Redundancy and increased uptime
Scalability Options
Archiving (custom solution)
JIRA Clustering from WANdisco
JIRA MultiSite from WANdisco
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Clustering & MultiSite by WANdisco
Clustering balances workload across servers at a single site over a LAN
MultiSite balances workload across multiple sites over a WAN and
resolve WAN latency issues
Both solutions can be implemented in combination
Provides self-healing & eliminates risk in disaster recovery
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Archiving – Customized Solution
One-way archiving
Archiving as an “issue operation” on per-issue basis
Archiving ‘in bulk’ via page similiar to bulk operations
JIRA Archive becomes read-only
JIRA Archive has fixed project schemes (i.e. same permissions
and workflow across the board for all issues)
JIRA Archive and JIRA Production run same version
Issue keys may or may not be preserved
Issue stubs may or may not be preserved
Attachments would be archived separately behind the scenes
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Partner - CustomWare
http://www.customware.net/
Gold Atlassian Partner based out of Australia
CustomWare is an Atlassian Partner providing rapid implementation,
training and support to Atlassian customers worldwide
They worked on and offsite
Strong Enterprise Integration background, understanding of Web
Services, Siebel etc.
Fast, reliable & thorough – they *really* know the Atlassian products
Have a large team and 7 x 24 support
Helped us with some complex custom Bugzilla migrations
Have lots of plugins for JIRA and Confluence, including Salesforce.com
integration for both products.
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL
Q&A
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POLYCOM CONFIDENTIAL