Looking for best practices for setting up Jira and Confluence for a community development situation

[Jerry Scharf]

Hi,

Open Source Routing is working to reintegrate a number of independent development track into Quagga and provide a common testing framework for existing and future work. We have chosen Jira/Confluence to base this work on. We are probably looking at ~20 major contributors from across the world.

Are there any best practices documents about ways to set up Jira and friends in a community development project. If not, are there a few comparable sized projects that would be willing to share their experiences with what worked and didn't work for them in bringing Jira and friends in.

you can contact me at jscharf-at-opensourcerouting-dot-org.

thanks in advance

jerry

[Luis Mayora · Accepted solution]

I can speak only for JIRA

1. Dont go Workflow crazy. I heard that in a company had like 250 workflows(to many). You need to create 3 or 4 categories for workflows(agile, waterfall,etc). You need to match different teams within these categories. Otherwise you probably have a lot of workflows to maintain. If you company is going to hire full time atlassian experts then go workflow crazy. But I dont think this is the case for many companies.(Keep it Simple)

2. The same applies for Permission, Notification schemes. We currently have 3 types of Permission schemes and 3 types of notifications schemes(No more!)

3. Make sure you evaluate and test your plugins in a standard way. Take a look at the logs, make people use the plugins for a while before installing them on production.

4. Always, always set up a Sandbox Jira Instance to test your changes.

[Jerry Scharf]

I was thinking more about workflows, user management, etc.

[Luis Mayora]

1. Use MySQL Database

2. Use Linux on the server

3. Use the same instance Tomcat for both(If you have more than 1 server you can have two instances)

4. Set up a really good Backup Procedure

5. Dont go Plugin Crazy

6. Wait for JIRA 5.0 (November. Is really cool!)