Annual upgrade of JIRA successfully completed

Upgrade of issue reporting software successfully delivered, with big thanks to our summer intern.

This project - COM040 - oversaw the annual upgrade of our JIRA software - a central element in the range of software tools that we use. As we all know, it is extremely rare to have a project that has no issues. These can be thrown up at any stage of a project - developing a new environment; migrating a database to an upgraded version; peer testing of software, or user acceptance testing of an application. Any such issues need to be recorded and documented for further investigation and (hopefully) resolution.

We use a program called JIRA within IS Application Services for this purpose and it as important part of our projects and business. Issues like those listed above are recorded as they are encountered then assigned to a member of a project team to resolve, as far as possible. If not to completion, the reported issue and the record of what has been done in relation to a solution can be assigned to another team or individual. There is thus a complete record of any project issues, who has worked on them, and how they were sorted out. Issues that are not resolved can be listed and checked when it comes to project closure, and closed issues can act as a reference point for follow-on or related projects.

This year's upgrade project has now been closed and it can be reported that this went very smoothly - all milestones were met and the project was delivered under budget. The success of the project can be attributed to the good work done by one of our summer interns - Pedro Schulze Navarette. Pedro worked on the planning for this project - putting together the project brief; plans; an estimation and organising project team meetings for the earlier stages of the project. He understood what was needed for each step, and only required direction when it came to following our own procedures. So, a big thanks to Pedro and further evidence of the success of the intern program.

And issues on this project? Checking JIRA, it seems that none were reported, so this was one of those rare projects.