Is anyone using JIRA as an enterprise data dictionary?

Peter Moline October 20, 2016

Has anyone ever seen JIRA used to store a data dictionary or glossary of terms, for the purpose of documenting how data is used in different systems across the enterprise?  I'm wondering whether it is practicable to set up an issue type scheme with three issue types: Class, Generic Attribute, and Specific Instance. And then to use issue linking to indicate the relationships between them.

For example, create a 'Class' issue called Person. It has 'Generic Attributes' of Name, Email Address, Login, Position, etc. Perhaps these are created as sub-issues. Repeat for other classes such as Client.

For each Generic Attribute, create multiple 'Specific Instance' issues for where it is used. E.g. for Email Address there would be multiple 'Specific Instance' issues for each system when email address is used such as Active Directory, Exchange, Google Docs, etc. Each would be linked to the 'Generic Attribute'  

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Peter Moline October 23, 2016

Thanks for taking the time to reply Jonas. 'Dictionary' might not be the right term, but I thought my examples helped to explain the concept.
Does Confluence have the same ability to filter pages by type? The ability to filter by component? Custom fields?

For sure JIRA is not the best platform for this, but sometimes you have to work with what you've got. In this case, the workflow part of JIRA would barely be used at all. But the linking of related issues, and sub-issues would be invaluable. Add a plug-in like Links Hierarchy https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.docminer.jira.issue-links/server/overview and all of a sudden you have visualisation as well

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Jonas Andersson
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October 21, 2016

IMHO this doesn't make much sense. Would you use a single ticket as a dictionary or a ticket per word/term? This sounds way more like a job for confluence (the wiki product made by Atlassian that plugs in perfectly to tickets, if a dictionary would ever need that.) Feel free to explain further if i am missing something here.

 

 

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