Utilizing Atlassian Jira For Large-Scale Software Development Management*

Used actively by the National Ignition Facility (NIF) [1] since 2004, the JIRA issue tracking system from Atlassian is now used for 63 different projects. NIF software developers and customers have created over 80,000 requests (issues) for new features and bug fixes. The largest NIF software project in JIRA is the Integrated Computer Control system (ICCS), with nearly 40,000 issues. In this paper, we’ll discuss how JIRA has been customized to meet our software development process [2]. The ICCS software team developed a custom workflow in JIRA for tracking code reviews, recording both developer and quality control team test results, and managing product releases. JIRA’s advanced customization capability has proven to be useful in tracking key metrics about ICCS development effort (e.g. developer workload). ICCS developers store software in a configuration management tool called AccuRev, and document all software changes in each JIRA issue. Specialized tools developed by the NIF Configuration Management (CM) team analyse each software product release, insuring that each software product release contains only the expected changes.