The Atlassian Activity Stream Plugin
The Atlassian Activity Stream Plugin gives you a consolidated view of all of the activity taking place in your projects. Appearing in JIRA as a project tab or dashboard portlet, the Activity Stream collects information from JIRA, Confluence, FishEye and Crucible.
What will it show?
- JIRA: issues that are created, updated, and resolved, as well as comments and attachments
- Confluence: pages, comments, news items and attachments that are created or edited
- FishEye: committed changesets
- Crucible: reviews that are created, approved, commented, marked as complete or incomplete, closed, or otherwise updated
The Activity Stream is also provided as an Atom feed.
Viewing the Activity Stream as a Project Tab
The Activity Stream will appear as a project tab for each JIRA project. To view the ten most recent changes in a particular project, click the 'Activity Stream' tab on the project page:
You can temporarily change the amount of activity displayed on the 'Activity Stream' tab, by following the steps below:
- Navigate to the Activity Stream for a project by clicking the 'Activity Stream' tab on the project page.
- Click the 'Configure' button. The configuration panel will display.
- Enter the number of items you wish to be displayed in the 'Activity Stream' tab for this project, up to a maximum of 100.
- Click the close button in the upper-right corner of the configuration panel to update the page.
The configured number of items displayed is not saved. It will reset to 20 items the next time you visit the project page. You will need to add a dashboard portlet for the Activity Stream, if you want to see more than 20 items by default.
Viewing the Activity Stream as a Dashboard Portlet
Adding the Dashboard Portlet
To add the 'Activity Stream' portlet to your dashboard, follow the steps below:
- Click the 'Configure: ON' link in the dashboard.
- Click 'Add a new portlet'.
- Choose 'Activity Stream' from the list of available portlets.
- Click 'Add'.
- To display the activity for a single project in the stream, select the project. Alternatively, to display the combined activity across all projects in the stream, select 'All Projects'.
- Enter the number of items you want to display in the portlet, up to a maximum of 100. Choosing a large number may cause the Activity Stream to take longer to load.
- Click 'Save'.
- When you return to the dashboard, you will see an Activity Stream very similar to the one on the project page, but without the 'Configure' button.
Configuring an existing Dashboard Portlet
To change the project displayed in the portlet or the number of items, follow the steps below:
- Make sure the dashboard is in 'Configure' mode, by clicking the 'Configure: ON' link in the dashboard.
- Click the 'Configure' button in the portlet's frame. The configuration page for the portlet will display.
- Choose the project and the number of items, as above.
Unlike the Activity Stream on the project tab, configuration changes that you make for portlets are saved and will be used any time you return to the dashboard.
For more information on configuring your dashboard, see the JIRA User's Guide and JIRA Administrator's Guide.
Understanding an Activity Stream
Activity Streams have been designed to be easy to understand, even for a casual observer. However, they do provide a lot of information in a compact space. Understanding how streams are built and displayed can help you read the content of your streams more effectively. The following Activity Stream concepts are described below:
Activity Items
Each item in the Activity Stream represents an issue, wiki page, news item, changeset or code review that has been added, changed, commented on or had a file attached to it.
The description of each activity item shows you:
- Who performed the activity
- The type of activity they made
- The object affected. JIRA issue keys, Confluence page names, FishEye changeset IDs, and Crucible review keys are linked to the pages for those items in each application.
- Comments associated with each change appear beneath the description.
- Images attached to JIRA issues and Confluence pages or news items appear as thumbnails under the comments.
Sections
Items are grouped into sections by time period.
The size of the time period depends on how much time has passed between the oldest item in the stream and the newest item:
- If the oldest and newest items are within two days of each other, the sections break down by date and hour.
- If they are more than two days apart but less than thirty days apart, items are grouped by date only.
- If more than thirty days have passed between the oldest and newest items in the stream, the sections are grouped by month and year.
This means that streams that are more active and configured to display fewer items, will have more fine-grained section groupings than streams that have less activity or have more items displayed.
Activity Grouping
If a particular issue, wiki page, news item or review is particularly active, multiple updates may be automatically combined into a single item in the Activity Stream. The Activity Stream plugin detects activity with the same type, on the same object, within the same time period, and groups them into one activity item.
If more than one person is responsible for the activity that is combined, the description will name the person who performed the first activity, and tell you how many other authors were combined into the item.
The text of each comment appears beneath the description, in the order they were added, with each author's name preceding it in a format that looks like a chat room or instant messenger conversation. For example, if William James, May Sinclair and James Joyce all comment on a JIRA issue with the key STREAM-100 within the same hour, the Activity Stream will contain an item such as:
Partial Streams
The streams are built within JIRA, but contact the Confluence and FishEye/Crucible servers to retrieve their activity. If one of the servers cannot be reached, or there is an error gathering information from one of the sources, a partial stream will be created from the information that is available. If a stream appears to be missing all of the activity from Confluence, FishEye or Crucible, it may be because one of those services are temporarily unreachable.
Using the Atom Feed
In the upper-right corner of all Activity Streams there is an orange feed icon that links to the Atom feed for that stream. You can use this to receive updates on project activity using an Atom feed reader, or to reproduce the Activity Stream on another website. The number of items in the feed can be configured by changing the "maxResults" value at the end of the URL.
