My long-term business partner, Trent, told me the other week he was going to write a rebuttal to my previous rant, “What’s wrong with ClearQuest“, called “What’s getting slightly better about ClearQuest”. I think he’s struggling to fill a few paragraphs though, because it hasn’t been forthcoming.
He recently wrote a reply on the forum that the admins must have deleted, completely lacking a sense of humour as they do. Anyway, it’s worth blogerising for posterity.
i am a fresher to clearquest.i am still in learning phase of it.i will be very thankful to you if some of you can give me some information on clearquest scope for career growth
In my neck of the woods you’re more typically seeing $35.00/hr for a contract position for ClearQuest admin.
Trent responded with the following:
$35/hr? To work on ClearQuest? No thanks, I’d rather stay home and pull teeth.
I won’t get out of bed these days for anything less than £100/hr if I have to do ClearQuest work. And I increase my minimum hourly rate annually at about 5 times the rate of inflation. You can be horrendously incompetent in London and still fetch £450-600/day, depending on whether your client has any idea about ClearQuest. (The hidden subtext here is that you can make a lot of money claiming to specialise in ClearQuest, and as long as no-one else in the company knows any better, get away with it even if you know diddley-squat.)
Continue reading ‘What’s Wrong with ClearQuest II’
Here is a relatively simple way to highlight overdue issues… the more overdue they are, the hotter the colour:
Continue reading ‘Highlight Overdue Issues’
I was keen to get my grubby mitts on the JIRA 4.0 beta to see what JQL (jira query language) was all about… this is my first test-drive, I haven't read much of the release notes or the bug reports, so I'm probably way off on some of this.
Continue reading ‘JIRA 4.0 Beta Test Drive’
As an addendum to the previous post, I've done some more cleaning up, and JIRA is now 12 times faster on the average measurement.
| Label |
# Samples |
Average |
Min |
Max |
| Login |
3 |
18 |
13 |
29 |
| LoginFBrowse |
10 |
41 |
10 |
184 |
| Get issue |
903 |
590 |
21 |
7792 |
| Dashboard |
9 |
14836 |
10006 |
18698 |
| LazyLoaderPortlet |
9 |
632 |
298 |
1091 |
| CreateIssue Link |
9 |
367 |
165 |
634 |
| Create Choose type |
9 |
289 |
141 |
677 |
| Issue Details |
9 |
2195 |
1269 |
3521 |
| TOTAL |
961 |
727 |
10 |
18698 |
Continue reading ‘How to Make JIRA Twelve Times Faster’
Over the last few months JIRA performance has tanked, but gradually. Difficult to think of any particular inflexion point, just more users, projects and issues.
I had a number of changes I had in mind to help:
- Application server
- DBMS type and location
- Caching for static content
- Reducing numbers of projects, groups etc.
- Optimising indexes.
- Turn gzip compression on.
- Memory and garbage collector settings.
- Bypassing the apache reverse proxy and going direct to Tomcat
- Use AJP13 connector instead of (as well as?) ProxyPass.
BTW, if you're looking for the instruction on where the "go-faster switch" is and can't be bothered to read the following, I'll tell you simply that you should replace the group jira-users in your roles or permission schemes with Anyone. If you're not using that then hopefully there will be something else of interest here, if only how to set up a simple load test to get some figures.
For the record our numbers at the time of testing are:
Issues 112897 Projects 475 Custom Fields 505 Workflows 239 Users 7613 Groups 698
Continue reading ‘How to make JIRA 6 1/2 times faster’
I’ve refreshed the workflow plugin a bit. If you want jump straight to the installation section.
A problem I’ve noticed with the workflows people create (not my own ones of course!) is that the resolution is often inconsistent.
This might stem from a lack of understanding of the resolution field and what it’s used for. In the default workflow, there is a state called Resolved, and when you get to that state the resolution must be set, and if you reopen the issue it’s unset, so people tend to think it happens by magic. It doesn’t, that’s the way the default workflow has been written, and there is no relationship between workflow states and the resolution, unless you define one. Continue reading ‘Jira Workflow Report Update’
This simple plugin allows you to run Groovy scripts in the context of confluence. Groovy scripts have full access to the API.
This is in the same spirit as the Jira groovy runner, that is, it lets you quickly develop proofs of concepts and simple macros, without having to worry about all the boilerplate of a Confluence plugin, and the agonisingly slow edit-debug-deploy cycle (even with JavaRebel). Developing should be as simple as adding your macro, saving the page, make changes to your groovy script, then reload the page.
If you use IDEA (probably true of Eclipse too) you can attach the debugger, and break in to your groovy scripts.
Example page output from running the three supplied scripts:
Continue reading ‘Confluence Groovy Runner’
This plugin allows an administrator to impersonate another user, i.e. to
become that user in jira, without knowing their password - which is often
impractical if authentication is handled by LDAP.
Impersonation is useful for administration of shared filters, shared
dashboards, double-checking a user has permission to do an action etc.
The implementation is surprising simple, so simple in fact that I doubt it
will work in all circumstances. So far I have only tested on Jira 3.12.2
and Jira 3.13, with the DefaultAuthenticator and also an SSO solution that we use.
Installation
Drop the jar file: jira-plugin-switchuser-09.jar in to WEB-INF/lib and restart.
Note: This is compiled with Java 5 so you must be using a Java 5 or above
JVM. If you are still on 1.4 consider upgrading or compile the source yourself.
Usage
In the Administration page, under “User, Groups & Roles” you should see a new
link “Switch User”. Further details are on that page.
I set up Confluence to integrate with our LDAP infrastructure, to take advantage of protecting spaces with LDAP groups. We had performance issues but I increased the cache timeout in the confluence-coherence-cache-config.xml properties file as documented here.
I then thought everything was well as performance seemed “OK”, however reports of poor performance, like 15-25 seconds to get the dashboard page, started to trickle through to me. It turned out I had been in a fool’s paradise, as if you are in the confluence-administrators group all the permissions checks are bypassed.
Continue reading ‘Synchronising LDAP Groups with Confluence Groups’
It’s not possible in JIRA to create an Issue Security Scheme by issue type. For instance, you may want that defects should default to Private, and enhancements should default to public (or none). You might expect that issue type security scheme would be a mapping of issue types to issue security schemes (in the same way as Field Configuration Schemes), but unfortunately not.
There are two ways to get round this, one using Javascript, one with a post-function.
Continue reading ‘Setting issue security level by issue type’
