JIRA Scriptrunner development with VCS

[Roman Orlovskiy]

I am curious if someone has any specific recommendations or best practices regarding incorporation of VCS like Git into JIRA scripts development process using ScriptRunner for JIRA and its Intellij IDEA plugin.

Currently, a couple of JIRA admins are working on the staging environment via SR's IDEA plugin. We add new features, test them on the staging server and then deploy to the production server when they are done. We want to have some VCS to keep track of the script changes and possibly for code review process.

We are both working on staging as most of the new script changes are based on existing projects, workflows, issue types, custom fields, etc. It would be great to have local development environments that are an identical copy of the staging JIRA server, but it will be quite a pain to keep them in sync. SR's documentation recommends running local development environment using Atlassian SDK with automated test scripts that set up the necessary custom fields, issues, projects, etc, however, those tests should be created and maintained properly to fully duplicate the staging environment, which seems troublesome again.

The issue we have faced is that Scriptrunner's IDEA plugin does not work well with Git. While working locally in IDEA via SR IDEA plugin with a local Git repo in the same IDEA project, anything that changes the working directory using Git (branches, reverts) will not be reproduced via SR IDEA Plugin as it only pushes changes to the server when the changes are manually saved in a project's file locally. This makes sense, but it is not convenient at all to use Git in such case for the same IDEA project.

I am not experienced with Git, so maybe I am looking in a totally wrong direction? What other possible options or recommendations can be used to integrate Git in a development process such as ours? Or should we reconsider this development process and avoid using the staging server as a single point for the development and testing between multiple admins? 

Any insight is welcome. I would also appreciate any examples or ideas for the proper development workflow with Scriptrunner and Git.