1. Large Scale JIRA Administration
David McCutcheon • LinkedIn
Matt Doar • ServiceRocket

2. JIRA and LinkedIn
SOME CONTEXT
OUR JIRA JOURNEY
Y O U R TA K E A W AY S

3. Behind the Scenes
• JIRA
• Git, Subversion
• Artifactory
• Ant, gradle
• Many local tools
• About 15 people

4. What do we use JIRA for?
JIRA replaces email and spreadsheets
• Engineering issues bugs
• Operations tasks
• IT helpdesk, HR helpdesk, Accounts helpdesk …
• Purchasing
• Data recording for automated tests (starting)

5. “It’s corporate glue”

6. JIRA at LinkedIn
SOME CONTEXT
OUR JIRA JOURNEY
Y O U R TA K E A W AY S

7. We have more than …
• 500K issues
• 1000 custom fields
• 200 workflows
• And 10K LDAP users and groups
... who all want their JIRA their way

8. Too many administrators

9. Leads to unexpected changes
• Lots of changes to JIRA are requested
• More than we can handle
• For a while we gave out admin privileges
like free candy
• That makes JIRA unstable

10. New features? It’s upgrade time!

11. Upgrades happen once a year
• JIRA is integrated with at least a dozen
other systems, testing needs coordination
• Lots of email template changes exist
• There are many JavaScript snippets in
field descriptions
• It’s hard work!

12. JIRA Spam

13. Email - a necessary evil
• People need to know about changes
• They want to know in minutes not hours
• But they can’t handle the volume anyway
• Neither can our mail server sometimes

14. We got help.
• Went to an Atlassian User Group
• Met people from ServiceRocket (aka CustomWare)
• They’re a local Atlassian Platinum Expert
• Matt Doar works for them and onsite for us

15. JIRA at LinkedIn
SOME CONTEXT
OUR JIRA JOURNEY
Y O U R TA K E A W AY S

16. Growth
Where do we go from here?
• Federated JIRA instances is the current plan
• Archiving would be even better since SOX
prevents deleting issues
• Use schemes to make some older projects readonly or hidden
• Provide a simple set of scheme choices for
project admins

17. TA K E AWAY S
Growth Takeaways
• Create custom screens rather than using
the default screen to avoid “surprise fields”
• Use custom issue type screens, since the
default issue type scheme changes as new
types are added
• Prefer roles over groups in schemes so you
can delegate to project administrators

18. Governance
Chaos grows with the number of administrators
• For any tool you need at least one admin plus a
spare
• “Double digits denotes danger”
• JIRA’s project Administrator role is the way to go
• But set expectations to avoid frustrating project
administrators

19. Make JIRA your
metatracker

21. What’s a metatracker?
It’s where you track issues about the issue tracker
• Use a project to create issues for changes to
JIRA
• Use a Kanban Agile board to track work
• Handle the small Tasks every day
• Larger requests can be Epic issues

22. Upgrading a large JIRA
Lots of planning and testing
• Thoroughly prepare the list of tasks
• Testing is assigned to project leads and owners
of other integrated systems
• Must upgrade in staging to be able to test
• Test issue create and edit, attachments, all status
changes, searches, dashboards and all add-ons

23. That isn’t just for JIRA

24. TA K E AWAY S
Upgrade Takeaways
• Document every file change for the next
time
• Version control may be even more useful
than automated deployment
• Use #include to minimize changes to
standard email templates
• Avoid custom JavaScript in field
configurations

25. Is Email even the right tool?

26. Outgoing Email
[ J I R A ] ( S U M M I T- 1 2 3 ) Yo u h a v e m o r e t h i n g s t o d o …
• Monitor the length of the mail queue
• Some problems are due to long timeouts
• Some may be due to rate limiting at the mail
server
• Best practice is to use authentication when
sending but not always …

27. Incoming Email
JIRA reading email from many people and apps
• Poll for email less often than once a minute if you
have many aliases and a few mailboxes
• Tell people what JIRA expects in an email, e.g.
Subject, From address
• With more than a dozen projects receiving email
use the JEMH add-on instead

28. TA K E AWAY S
Email Takeaways
• Use an email address dedicated to JIRA,
with no people using it directly
• Regularly check the JIRA log for problems
with contacting your email server
• Check for subscriptions to groups
• Check user has chosen to receive email
about their own changes

29. A Few Good Ideas
• Use a subscription to find dodgy workflows:
status != Closed and resolution is not empty
• Having a consistent way of naming JIRA
schemes really makes maintenance much easier,
e.g. “Project X : Bug : Create Screen”
• If an administration needs to be automated or
fast, try Jamie Echlin’s Script Runner add-on first

30. TA K E AWAY
We’re Nearly Done
• JIRA does 80% of what is wanted out of the
box
• This leads to rapid success
• Getting the next 10% for an enterprise is more
work, but is definitely possible

31. “It’s corporate glue”

32. Thank you!
Matt Doar • matt.doar@servicerocket.com
David McCutcheon • LinkedIn