Other use cases for Jira than software development

[Christian Axén]

I'm trying out JIRA for use cases other than the intended ones, particularly to handle non-conformities within the automotive industry. I've come to realise when trying it out building a custom workflow, screens and fields that I can't generate a report showing all the information I've added in screens from transitions. I would like to generate a report showing all the information I've put in the custom fields from all my screens in my workflow lets say below the Details and Description sections of an issue. It is from what I can see only available in the History tab. Is it possible?

Does anyone know if someone has used JIRA for something like this? I can think of many processes that we can use JIRA for but I need to be able to show a report with all the information.

[Andrew Wolpers [BlackPearl PDM] · Accepted solution]

Christian,

Back in the day I used to work for a bicycle company, which did everything from product development and design to actual assembly monitoring in JIRA. After, they would log their defects and any issues in JIRA. They were large, about 600 employees and did a few million in revenue each year.

We also had many parts of improvement using JIRA itself. So, if you had an idea you would put it in. From there it would follow a workflow with approval. So, say someone thought it was beneficial to get a new tool or use a different material–that would start here. This way you could track savings, costs, etc.

Additionally, many people use JIRA as an Asset Management system. JIRA has become much more of a versatile platform rather than specifically a bug/software development platform due to its ability to customize.

As far as only viewing your field values in the issue itself, you can also create your own JIRA filters based on what information you'd like to see. You can then display these on dashboards in these things called "gadgets" to visualize much of that information in the same place. If you want to get even more robust with reporting, there is also an add-on called eazybi that is pretty great for BI stuff.

Hopefully that answers your questions!

[Christian Axén]

Thank you Andrew! The bicycle company examples you mention are exactly the type of issues I would like the have although we do not have any assembly processes we do have a lot of machining. Did the bicycle company plug into an MPS system from JIRA? I've not done much with JIRA filters and dashboards yet but in the few tests I've done the custom fields did not show up. I probably messed up. Are you saying that it is possible to print a report in JIRA of a specific issue showing the data from the custom fields or do you have to rely on filers? The reason this is important is because our customers often ask for reports which is distributed in e-mails (CAPA, 8-D).

[Andrew Wolpers [BlackPearl PDM]]

No problem! For an MPS we did a bit of REST API updating FROM the MPS TO JIRA itself, when applicable. Basically we had values from the MPS system fill in certain values in JIRA's custom fields, generate issues, etc. So, what you're probably missing here are the columns themselves. On the filter results page (and on the gadgets themselves) you can configure the columns (https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+Issue+Table+Columns) or fields that appear. In gadgets it's pretty obvious on things such as "filter results". I rely mainly on filters, as do most that I've seen around. However, you could filter these issues into different gadgets and display on a dashboard to give you a good amount of information out-of-the-box. Check out this blog for a bit more insight on capabilities of stock JIRA dashboards: http://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/09/5-steps-to-build-a-killer-dashboard/