The Jira software full form is Gojira. The name ‘JIRA’ is derived from the Japanese term ‘Gojira,’ which means ‘Godzilla.’ It is not a complete form. The initial black-and-white Godzilla films were popular with Japanese developers, and the programme was dubbed ‘Gojira’; subsequently, the ‘go’ was deleted, and the tool was simply dubbed JIRA.
Jira is an agile tool for project management. It’s meant to be used by software engineers, so it has all of the features that one would need in this industry – from BDD testing tools and logging into your source control system with pull requests right through versioning history charts , etc.
However, there are some features that one could find useful when managing the software development process for web-based projects or large ones in general.
This article discusses how to implement a feature that is part of many project management tools – time tracking. We’ll do it using only free Atlassian tools (Jira, Bamboo, Fisheye and Crucible).
So, let’s say that we’re working on an agile project which has the following features: The development team is distributed across different locations. Each developer monitors their own time spent on the tasks they are assigned to do. They need to report their daily plan in advance so that they can track the time they spend on the tasks. This data will be sent to an internal tool via email so that Accounting can evaluate it later.
Step One: Create a Worklog Jira plugin
The first thing we need is to create a custom Worklog plugin so that developers don’t have to manually input their time in the system, but just press a button when they finish their task to automatically input the time.
We’ll create this plugin in Jira in just three simple steps:
Step One: Create Custom Field Type in JIRA for Worklog Plugin First, I created a “Custom Field Type” for my work log in Jira. You can find instructions on how to do this here .
Step Two: Create Worklog Plugin We’ll create a simple plugin that will run at the end of the task and read data from it. This plugin can later be used for all Jira issues types. I named mine “Worklog” but you could name yours anything you like. Here’s how to configure it:
Step Three: Send Worklog Data to Jira
For the final step, I wrote a simple script that will send data to Jira if it detects that an issue was updated. You can find the code here . This works by reading data from the task you are working on (by default it reads project name, title and description) and sends it to Jira by adding a new comment.
After you have all of this set up, each time a developer finishes their task they will see a “Time Tracking” button next to the Update button. If they click on this button, a popup window will open and ask them how many hours they spent on this issue. They can also write a quick note to describe what they worked on.
After that, Jira will automatically input all of this data into the task and close the popup window.
– Here’s how it looks like in your issue:
– And here’s how you would report time spent on tasks from Bamboo:
Step Two: Set up Remote Issue Tracker
Next, we need to create a remote issue tracker that will handle all of the time tracking data. We’ll use Bamboo for this task because it has built-in support for reading data from Jira. It’s free so you can just download it here . You have to configure it by telling Bamboo where your Jira instance is located and what fields it has so that Bamboo can use this information to connect to Jira. You can find a guide here .
After that, you will have a new option in your list of changes – “Time Tracking” which allows you to enter the time spent on each task.
Step Three: Configuring Crucible to read from Jira
Last, but not least, we will create a simple script that sends data from our remote issue tracker to Crucible – another free Atlassian tool. Here’s how it works:
We have now successfully configured all three tools to read and update issues in each other without ever having to manually input this time into any of the systems.
– Now developers can easily track their time spent on tasks and Management can evaluate this data with Crucible.