Jira Cubicle Edition

long time no updates (March!), I'm getting sloppy on the good old blog so I thought it's about time to share this one.

Unfortunately I didn't get Jira approved at my current job, and we have to use both TestDirector and Bugtrack. Sigh, Yeah I know, but hey you can only lead the horse to the water... Anyways I decided I need a better way to track my day to day issues and put this one together pretty quickly. Since I borrowed a few ideas from the guys at Atlassian, I decided to add a small name tag at the top right and suddenly people in the team started to refer to my little wall of issues as "Jira" :) So far (~3 months) I have to say the XP style cards work surprisingly well for me, the best thing about it being the immediacy of you knowing what you're working on with a single look up from your desk.

Just like in real Jira the yellow issues are tasks, green is for features, blue are improvements and red are bugs, lined up in a column each. I leave only open issues up on the Jira wall and take them down immediately once the code is checked in and tested. The cubicle wall accomodates around 25 issues at once which is a good limit for general developer sanity, if it gets too busy I know it's time to turn down new work requests.

I have tried taking pictures of the wall with my pda phone before going to status update meetings and while you can't say reading the cards is possible on that resolution their position shape and color, strangely enough, *do* remind me of what I'm working on :)

You'll also notice the "toolbar" at the bottom - a more obscure issue wizard which still has to prove it's use :), the "add issue" coffee cup which holds the pins, markers and cards, and the "closed issues" cup, which is where issues go when they're done. Usually at night after work, they're moved over to the clip on the right which resembles the change log for an iteration.

All in all not too much effort, just takes a bit of discipline and a good ongoing supply of stationary (thanks Toni!). Jira cubicle edition comes as a DIY kit around $25 and will fit most cubicles.