JIRA Issue Links Report Plugin

Description/Features

The plugin currently adds new report to JIRA capabilites: Issue Links Matrix.
Features:

• support for any filter (respects issue ordering) and project
• full text or abbreviated links name
• link type color encoding or black-and-white standard output
• support for many link types simultaneously
• support for inward and outward links (separetly or togehter)
• explicit or automatic selection of issues to include in report
• security configuration for issues is honored - if user does not have access to some issue - the issue will not be included in the report (similarily to links in standard JIRA issue view)
• self-explanatory legend (I hope)

Screenshots speak louder than words

Screenshots
Report Configuration Screen	Sample report 4	Sample report 3
Sample report 2	Sample report 1

Installation & System Configuration

• Just download jar file, copy it to your WEB-INF/lib directory and restart JIRA.
• Tested on JIRA 3.8 and 3.10 Enterprise running on Tomcat 5.5.x with FF 2 and IE 6.
• Works only with Java 1.5+ - sorry as C++ veteran I almost could not bear Java prior 1.5... (just kidding, but anyway if there is a strong need to backport it - I may do it)
• Issue Linking in JIRA administration panel must be switched on

Reading the matrix

In order to conserve the screen space and make non-trivial size matrices still usable, the plugin uses some convention.

• full issue link names: row to column order, e.g. issues TST-5 (in some row) "is duplicated by" issue TST-4 (in some column)
• abbreviated issue link names: row to column order + observe arrow icons which illustrate direction (inward, outward)

Small extras:

• hovering mouse pointer over issue key gives you tooltip with issue summary
• hovering mouse pointer over abbreviated link symbol gives you full link name

Configuration

Report configuration parameters

described in detail in report configuration screen

Color configuration

To customize colors used to denote various link types, please extract jira-issue-links-report-plugin.properties file from jar, put it into WEB-INF/classes and modify as needed using RGB color encoding. Restart JIRA afterwards.

Potential usage:

• tracability matrix (e.g. columns are requirements or stories, rows are detailed requirements or concrete tasks which implement them)
• stakeholder management matrix (stakeholders are maintained as "issues" and linked to issues they request - in this way it is also possible
  to protect privacy of stakholders (important in some companies): stakeholders can be kept in a separate project with different permissions scheme and whereas any user
  can view and comment on any requirement, the users cannot who is the requestor (or requestors) of given issues
• QA coverage matrix (tests are linked to issues/requirements/bugs)
• general helper for keeping issues clean and consistent in JIRA (e.g. easier visual detection of dependent issues)

Support, troubleshooting, ideas and suggestions

Please do not post your comments to this page, as it quickly will become unmantainable and unreadable.
Please use JIRA project for suggesting improvements or reporting any bugs.
For support or general discussion (including troubleshooting) please use JIRA User Forum

Performance and some technical details:

• the matrix is built in memory-conserving way - that is the memory complexity is lineary propotional to the number of depicted links between issues and does not depend on the number of issues themselves (in X and Y axis)
• in typical projects with sparse linking - very fast (miliseconds to generate whole matrix for 10 - 20 issues x 100 issues)
• in artificially generated set of issues with quite dense linking - about 10 seconds to generate matrix 220 x 220 issues. I wonder if such big matrix is of any use (for human being at least)...
• with matrices bigger than about 250 x 500 issues with my JIRA installation I encounter "Out of heap memory" problem, which is not caused by the matrix generation itself, but rather by velocity template processing by JIRA (which is somewhat astonishing as HTML for matrix 250 x 500 consumes about 15 - 20 MB). Anyway with such big matrices (and generated HTML) FireFox 2.x becomes unresponsively sluggish and only Internet Explorer suprisingly stays vigorous.

Further ideas for improvement (let me know if they make sense or not and drop your own thoughts)

• fast deletion of existing issue links (the best AJAX based) by clicking on a matrix cell
• fast addition of new issue links (the best AJAX based) by clicking on a matrix cell
• Excel output
• bulk operations on whole column or row (i.e. on all issues having given type of link with given issue)
• creation of graphical issue links dependency map (see http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-2544)
• portlet offering the same functionality

Note to administrators and developers

I've built this plugin in Test Driven way. So most of backend code is covered by unit tests (HTML rendering part was left uncovered).
Unfortunately I could not test everything in full isolation from core JIRA components (e.g. as some importent JIRA components - like issue or generic value are just classes and not interfaces).
That is why I also prepared some unit tests working together with JIRA and started when the plugin is asked for generating report.
You can switch on this unit tests (will be launched only once - before the first generated report) by setting the following environmental variable TEST_ISSUE_LINKS_REPORT before you start your web app server
(e.g. on Unix machines)

Unit tests results will be directed to standard output. Please make sure you have junit.jar in your classpath (WEB-INF/lib).
You may use this functionality to check if plugin works on certain JIRA version (e.g. before upgrading, in test environment).
You should not use launch this unit tests in production as the tests create temporary project, link types, a lot of issues, etc.
In case of some nasty problem you may end up with some rubbish in your JIRA instance...
If anybody knows how to write decent automatic integration or non-trivial unit tests with JIRA - I would be happy to learn.

Version History

Open Issues

Atlassian Developer Network JIRA (4 issues)
T	Key	Summary	Reporter	Status
	ILR-1	showing indirect links	Serdar Sultanoglu	Open
	ILR-2	Excel export would be great	Bernhard Riegel	Open
	ILR-3	summary instead of issue-keys in column/row headers to make the matrix "human readable"	Bernhard Riegel	Open
	ILR-4	Bulk link : An issue should be allowed to be linked to multiple issues in one shot or vice a versa	Vishwajeet Singh	Open