In the two projects I’m working on, I’ve been given the role of administrator in Atlassian JIRA, the application we use for tracking tasks and bugs. This has its pros and cons.

The reason I was given this role is that it’s required to move tasks and bugs through the workflows that our department has set up. In the past, I’ve had to pester project managers to move my items into the status where I could then resolve them to be tested. Usually, I didn’t remember to do this until I was ready to resolve the item. So the workflow wasn’t really work-flowing if you get my drift.

Now, as an administrator, I can usher my items through each step until I’ve resolved them. However, the problem with being a project administrator is that I get what I call JIRA spam. And lots of it.

Usually, when you want to see what’s going on with a JIRA item, you click a link to watch it. And then you get an email when its workflow status changes or someone adds a comment. But as an administrator, I get an email every time an item is created—doesn’t matter who creates it or to whom it’s assigned.

On the other hand, this can be a good thing. Because every team member is an administrator in JIRA for one of these projects (so they can also move items through the workflow themselves), I expect most of them have set up rules in Outlook to send the JIRA spam right on past their inboxes and into the trash or some other folder they ignore except when they empty it. But I’ve found that if I at least scan the title of the item as it sits in my inbox, I learn valuable information about changes that are proposed or planned in the project. And then I can go into JIRA and put a watch on items of interest to me.

So it’s an interesting catch. I get a lot of email out of JIRA, but it’s a way for me to keep abreast of changes. I just have to sift through the dirt to find the gold. Since the gold is there, I figure I’ll endure the dirt.

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