Title: Guidelines for creating a Jira ticket
Jira is a proprietary issue tracking product developed by Atlassian that allows bug tracking and agile project management. Atlassian provides Jira services to Apache projects. The tool's name is a short form of the name of the Japanese movie monster, Godzilla, and was an early developer nickname for the application.
Anyone can review existing Jira tickets, or issues. You must register and log in if you want to create, comment or vote on, or watch issues. Only developers can edit, prioritize, schedule and resolve issues.
ASF and many of its projects use Jira to keep track of work to be done. The largest group of tickets assigned to Infra are requests for Infra to perform a task of one sort or another. The next largest category is reports of possible bugs in the Infrastructure system:
Browse the existing Jira tickets to see if others have already reported the bug you noticed or have requested the task or additional feature that you were going to ask for. If you find a ticket that covers what you wanted to report, you can add a comment and maybe some more relevant information to the existing ticket.
If there is nothing in Jira already that covers what's on your mind, click “Create” to display a form where you can describe your issue or request. Providing as much relevant information as you can helps Infra respond quickly and appropriately.
The form is pretty clear, so the focus here is on a couple of key fields.
This is the group you want to take a look at the ticket. Select “Infra” for an infrastructure issue or request. Select a specific project if the issue is something like a problem in the project's documentation or website.
There's a good list of issue types to choose from. Make sure you select the most appropriate one.
Maybe you want Infra to look at a problem with the Apache Widget project. Then in this field you would select Widget. Most of the time, for an Infra ticket, you will select Infra again.
This is your quick statement of your problem or request. “Infra is broken!” would not be a useful statement. Something like “Self-serve site hangs, then crashes” is more likely to get the right person's attention and a prompt resolution to the problem.
Make your best guess at how urgent this thing is. Infra triages Jira tickets by their prioritiesm, and may adjust the priority of a ticket if we feel its current setting is too high or too low.
The options are
Select one or more components that this issue or request relates to. If you cannot figure out what to pick, select “Other/misc”.
This an optional field, useful if your issue concerns a specific Infra tool or service and you know the version you are using.
If you specify someone here, that person receives an alert about the issue. You can accept the default (Automatic) to put the issue in the queue for the Infra team.
This is an optional field where you can describe your operating system, software platform and/or hardware specifications if they are relevant to the bug, task, or feature request.
Provide the juicy details here. For example, for a bug report, Infra needs to know how to reproduce the thing you ran into. Describe what you were doing (“I was logged in to bla.html using Firefox”), what you wanted to do (“I wanted to do xxx”), what you expected to happen, and what you actually experienced.
For a feature request, it helps if you can not only describe the feature, but explain why the project needs it.
There are many more optional fields that you can probably skip.
When you have completed entering the useful information, click Create to create the ticket.