Jira tips and tricks

Having just filed a number of Graffito issues in the Jira installation at the ASF, I figured it might be useful if I shared some of the tips and tricks I've learned as a relatively heavy user of Jira. Here comes:

• You can personalize your Dashboard page to show all sorts of custom reports and statistics. I've configured mine to show summary statistics for all the projects I'm involved with and to list all the open issues assigned to me along with some generally useful links.


• When navigating back and forth over a number of related issues, click the "History" link on the top-right corner to access all the recently visited issues.


• You can configure the number of issues listed per page by editing your preferences on your profile page. I've set my preferences to 100 issues per page to avoid having to page back and forth over long issue lists.


• On the same preference editor you can also disable the feature that sends you an email notification of all the actions you've made on the web interface. I usually get those notifications anyhow through the issue mailing lists, so there's no need for duplicates.


• The "Road Map" tab on a project page gives a nice overview of the TODO's for an upcoming release.


• There's a "Subversion commits" tab on the issue pages that lists all commits whose commit message includes the key of the respective issue. There are even links to the ViewVC interface. Very useful! The "All" tab shows you both the issue comments, metadata changes, and Subversion commits on a single time-line.


• When opening an issue from the Issue Navigator, the upper right corner of the issue contains a small box that allows you to "Return to search" or to jump directly to the "Previous" or "Next" issue on the list.


• You can "Configure" the Issue Navigator to customize the set of columns it displays. I've replaced the default "Bugzilla Id" column with the "Components" column.


• You can customize any issue search by clicking "Edit" in the top left corner of the Issue Navigator. You can also save such customized filters for future use.


• You can subscribe the results of any query in your favourite feed aggregator.

There are probably a ton of other nice features that I haven't yet noticed.