Use Agile methods to develop Jira projects

[Charles Smothers]

I'm a new Jira admistator, and I have experiece as a software developer using Agile methods. I see how valuable the Atlassian suite is to the Agile software development process.

However it seems that as an administrator of Atlassian tools, there is not a way to use this same process. I would like to be able to create a project in Jira and check it in to a repository. Then when a user asks for a new screen, or custom field, or workflow, I create a branch and work on it on a development Jira server, create a solution, propose the solution to the customer, they approve or reject. Once approved, the changes are merged and committed, and pushed to the production environment. And if there are several adminstrators, we can work concurrently on our changes and merge them at some point.

Has anyone created such an environment?

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Charles

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The problem there is that you're talking about (often rapidly changing) configuration of an application, rather than more static code.  There's not even a convenient or standard way to generate "code" for this config level work.

That said, I've done something like it.  Generated an export and stuck that in source control after stripping the issue data.  Nowadays, I'd do it a bit more cleverly, with one of the "project configurator" add-ons which can export, import and replicate.  There's no real "merge" though, and I don't think there can be an automatic one - however you cut it, humans need to be involved in configuring their projects.

[Charles Smothers]

Thanks Nic.

That is sort of what I was imagining - exporting the project configuration (not the issue data) and storing the result into a repository.

And I agree with your comment that humans need to be involved. Same is true for software projects. Automatic merges often result in integration problems. Which is why regression testing is critical.

It seems we have tools to make the process of Software Engineering ever more disciplined. But those tools suffer from those things that plagued software development decades ago. It would be great if those tools could leverage the same process.  

Thanks again for your comment, and I would welcome anyone else to share their process.

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Charles