In November, Steve Dalton and I hosted a partner seminar for the launch of JIRA 4.0. Steve’s company Refactor is an Atlassian partner and I attended on behalf of the Agile Academy who sponsored the room at Brisbane Square. Atlassian provided a JIRA t-shirt for all of the attendees.

Steve kicked off with an overview of JIRA and a demo of the the new Open Social dashboard as well as the new JQL functionality.

I then gave a demo of JIRA and GreenHopper 4.0, and its usage at Suncorp. Some of the topics I covered included:

• overview of other new Jira functionality, such as activity streams, the new menu system and the ability to create a new issue on the right hand side of the Find Issues screen
• GreenHopper is a plugin
• remember the difference between radiators and refridgerators when evaluating tools
• Suncorp chose JIRA due to cost and already in use
• housekeeping – GreenHopper administration (global and local), custom fields (story points, epics), performance
• planning board – versions and components, new epic functionality, synchronisation, release, drag and drop functionality, statistics, print cards, user preferences and contexts, new card button, new wiki rendering
• task board – setup, workflows, new Kanban functionality, storypoints, double click cards, subtasks
• chart board / release board – reliance on statistics and GreenHopper functionality
• cross project burn down and the new agile gadget

There is no video of the event, although I feel the JIRA 4 webinar covers much of the functionality we discussed quite nicely.