We’ve added a bunch of really nice features to the Jira Toolkit recently. I wanted to take a minute an outline the new additions because they’re enormously useful.
Attachments count and Comments count
We started with two simple custom fields that calculate how many attachments and how many comments have been added to an issue. These will appear in the issue view, but are much more useful in the issue navigator, where you can sort by them. It’s a great way to see which issues are getting a lot of attention.
Original estimates range searching
You can now search for issues by the number of hours in their Original Estimate field. It’s great when you’ve got an hour to kill before your next meeting and you want to pick some low-hanging fruit and nail a few simple issues. Or you can use it to find the really hairy issues and find some way to break them into bite-size chunks.
Resolved date custom field
This is my favorite! We now have a custom field for “Resolved Date.” You can now search a date range for when an issue was last resolved, rather than just last updated. I used to do a lot of Jira gardening: changing components, correcting typos, formatting summaries, linking issues. And all of those things would touch the updated date, making it really hard to go back and figure out when an issues was actually fixed. The Resolved Date eliminates all that hassle. Now you can update an issue as much as you want and you won’t lose information.
Message custom fields
And finally, we added some simple custom fields that allow you to put some HTML into the edit and view issue screens. It’s an easy way to add short messages or instructions to your issue screens.
We’re already using most of these of http://jira.atlassian.com and http://support.atlassian.com. If you want to add them to your own Jira, just download the plugin.
