Is there a best practice for naming/organizing fields, screens, etc in the administration sections of JIRA?

Justin Corcoran
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July 31, 2012

I'm currently the primary administrator for JIRA in my organization, but we plan to bring several more people into this role in the coming months. We also have a handful of people who have administration rights, but don't do much more than configure things for their specific projects. However, I'm already finding JIRA's administration screens to be extremely hard to use. They're just so cluttered. I have nearly a hundred custom fields, 40 or so screens, 10-15 workflows, etc, and the problem is just going to get worse when we roll JIRA out to the rest of the organization for use as their work tracking tool.

So, my question is this: does anyone have any suggestions or guidelines that they follow to keep the administration sections from becoming an absolute nightmare? From my perspective, it would be great to have something like folders or tags for screens, custom fields, etc so that I could group things together. However, as that doesn't exist today, how do you manage?

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Renjith Pillai
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August 14, 2012

It is a very generic question due to which the responses are delayed, I guess. Some rules could be

  1. Schemes and screens could be named used the Project Name it is related to or issue type
  2. Custom fields are tricky as they appear on the screen, so it is bad to have project names there. You can set the context right so that admins know for which project/issue type it is meant for. And for custom fields finally not becoming a performance issue, this video may help : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t44mPykXek

And probaly you need to figure the a set of rules as per your project context in the company, and make all the admins stick to it.

Justin Corcoran
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August 14, 2012

Thanks Renjith. I guess I was doing it "right" already - I name virtually everything I can with the project name included (except custom fields of course). It seems like folders would be a helpful enhancement to some parts of the administration screens. I can understand that you might not want that for custom fields, as many users might create the same field, because they didn't look in all the folders. However, for something like workflows, I'd love to be able to put each department's workflows into a folder for them.

Anyway, I'll look into adding that as an enhancement, and thanks for your feedback!

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Justin Corcoran
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August 7, 2012

2 votes, but only 11 views and no answers! Someone must have solved this somehow...

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