Swapping out chaos..
A few months ago, Kim Bryant, NPR’s Manager of Application Operations for Digital Media, posted on Inside NPR.org about their move from Bugzilla to Jira in order to address challenges with “managing work requests, bug tracking and other operational processes.”
Kim’s job is to figure out ways to work more efficiently, so it’s not surprising that NPR selected Jira. More specifically, Jira was brought in to deal with the following:
- multiple types of requesters with different levels of expertise
- multiple paths for making requests
- multiple types of requests
- different teams working at different levels at the same time
- figuring out resource load
Before diving into the new tool, Kim’s team wisely established some process ground rules to ensure that the humans involved with the process took priority over the tool.
“When we looked at what we needed to succeed with our culture and evolving development process, Bugzilla was like Matthew Broderick, CGI-slick, prettied-up, simplified sci-fi. We needed old skool, hard core, eat-the-train-cars-and-stomp-on-the-citizenry sci-fi (which happens to be the preference of the Atlassian Jira team, coincidentally.) Jira delivers”
– Kim Bryant of NPR Digital Media
You Say Godzilla, NPR Says Gojira!
In the second part of her blog series, Kim goes into the details about some of the frustrations of using Bugzilla for 4 1/2 years. She also drills into NPR’s top 5 reasons for switching to Jira, which are:
- Awesome permission levels
- Integration with other developer tools
- A smorgasbord of custom configurations
- The ability to track as much of our work as possible
- Statistics to make an ops manager weep for joy
Have you outgrown your old bug tracker?
The move itself is actually the easy part. Using the built-in Bugzilla importer it is possible to move bugs, products, versions, components and users from Bugzilla to Jira.
In addition to the built-in Bugzilla importer, Jira includes migration tools for Mantis, FogBugz and other bug trackers (plus, there are third-party migration tools for Trac and others).
To check out your data in Jira, just download a free trial of Jira and import data from your old bug tracker.
