TECHNOLOGY

Gigs' Corner

Taming the Linden Lab Beast with JIRA

by Gigs Taggart, Correspondent

Want to find out the latest statistics on Linden Lab’s software development
efforts? I’ve aggregated the statistics at a public beta site at Rob Linden’s request.
The goal of this site is to draw attention to issues that are important to users and
open source developers. You can find out today’s hottest issues, the most hated bugs,
the most wanted features, the top commenters, and the top bug reporters.

The JIRA name comes from Gojira, the Japanese name for Godzilla. This is an appropriate name for an issue tracking system from Atlassian Software that is being used by Linden Lab to track bugs and feature requests. The JIRA name pays homage to Atlassian’s main competitor, an open source issue tracker named Bugzilla.

An issue-tracking system is only as good as it’s ability to produce good information on issue priorities, defect reporting rates, and ratios of bug fix rates relative to development and test engineers. These are known in the industry as “QA metrics.” Such metrics can be used to assess the quality of a software product and to help keep track of progress.

Linden Lab’s implementation of JIRA has been much maligned by various bloggers and commentators as difficult to use, slow, and ineffective. Much of this criticism is well founded. As one of the most active contributors to Linden Lab’s community effort to manage issues on JIRA, I can definitely identify with these complaints. The search feature in JIRA is weak. The Excel download isn’t the familiar CSV format—it’s more like a web page embedded in a spreadsheet, which makes it very hard to use. JIRA is also lacking in the statistics department, and it’s hard to see trends. Without trends, it’s difficult to assess metrics.

When I see an opportunity, I go for it. Rob Linden called for a volunteer on the SL Dev mailing list to compile JIRA statistics. I volunteered. As a programmer, I knew I wouldn’t be happy to just compile the statistics by hand periodically, so I decided to import all the issues in JIRA into my own database, so that I could slice and dice them as needed. One thing lead to another... and now we have www.sljirastats.com. The site is still in beta testing, but it’s already very usable.

SLJiraStats is for both SL users and Linden Lab employees to use to get an overview of what’s hot and what’s not on the SL implementation of JIRA. In addition to the “Top 5” lists of interest, it features graphs of various statistics, and an advanced JIRA search engine. The search engine is already more powerful than the built-in JIRA search in some respects. If you want to find bugs created yesterday, go to the search box and type “yesterday” in the Created field. If you would like to download a spreadsheet version of your search results, it’s just a link away—in a fully editable CSV format. You can even download the bugs as Wiki markup if you would like to mash them into a Wiki article.

The SLJiraStats site helps to bridge the gaps in JIRA—both the social gaps between Linden Lab developers and Second Life users, and the technical gaps in the JIRA software itself. Gojira takes San Francisco!

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