JIRA Subscriptions

I'd like to see everyone become more aware of development issues or helpdesk requests as they arise to help us collect input and respond to issues more rapidly.  I'd like the same for the forum but the forum is NOT the subject of this post. JIRA is the subject of this post.


So I guess I have to first remind everyone that opt in communication is a basic tenet of these systems. This is because the opposite of opt in is the well known phenomena called spam.   If you don't choose to listen to these issues then your feedback cannot be collected and your help cannot be solicited.   In other words, failing to opt in is a choice to skip participation and self censor your opinion.

So to keep abreast of changes in JIRA tickets one has to opt-in to its alert systems. There are many ways to do this and this post is my summary of the options including a new one I just figured out myself.


The options as I see them are:

1. Watching tickets. For any JIRA ticket, login and "watch" the ticket.   This should mean that every change to that ticket triggers an email alert to you.  I've done this for many tickets but a problem is keeping up with new tickets and failing to watch new tickets or track ones that suddenly become active.

2. RSS for tickets/changes.  Using RSS means you think email is for personal communication not news.  There are RSS options for all kinds of JIRA activities; however, RSS on VAO JIRA does not work. I do not know why this does not work and it bugs me. I suspect is has to do with the fact that we close off JIRA to the outside world and one needs login cred to pull the posts. Anyway, RSS should work but I don't have time to figure it out.  Let me end by saying that RSS is NOT the subject of this post.
3. "Subscribe" to a JIRA Filter.  This is the issue I'd like to alert you to right now.

The sidebar of a  JIRA
filters page. This is where
you edit, save or subscribe
to a filter results.

As you may or may not know, one can write SQL like filters in JIRA (they call it JQL, haha) that capture some subset of tickets.  Following Portal activity from within JIRA is made easier by using one of the filters Tom Donaldson created for us:  "Portal 1.1" or "Portal open tickets".  These currently have counts of 58 and 151 tickets repectively.

There is another option in JIRA to receive emails about these ticket filters. This is called "subscribing" to a filter. You may have experienced and quickly deleted the "all bugs" JIRA subscription that we all started getting right after JIRA was setup.  The problem is either you think email is bad for this purpose (I am in this camp) or you fail to achieve any new information from these posts. The latter issue exists because these filters and their auto email alerts were not about giving you any new information.

The gist of this post is this:  one can create filters that capture only tickets that have "changed" within a certain amount of time. If you care the JQL is (updatedDate > "-1d" OR createdDate > "-1d"). This means that if you subscribe to these kinds of filters you receive email digests that alert you to the most recent ticket changes. For the portal this reduces the list from an email of 151 open tickets down to a list of typically 1-5 new or recently updated portal open tickets.

You can find, after logging into JIRA, the following such updating filters:

• portal open updated recently

• Help Desk Web Tickets Updated Recently

So how do you opt in?  To subscribe you look at the sidebar on either of the linked filters above and then click "Subscriptions" at the bottom.  You then add yourself as a subscriber to the issue. There are many options for how often you want these digests but the obvious one for a Daily filter is the "Daily" frequency.  Screen grabs of these subscription pages are below.

Coda:  In case I lost you, all these steps, from creating filters to subscribing to them, are actions you do while in JIRA.  You. Do. So if you have only a Monday per week to work on VAO then one might simply create a filter that grabs all the changes in a week long period (">-7d") and subscribe to a 2am Monday morning email you will be all set.

Subscription page for a filter.

Personal Subscription options.