This book is about plugins for JIRA, the popular issue tracker from Atlassian. An issue tracker lets people collaborate better when there are things to be done. You can use an issue tracker for everything from tracking bugs in software, to customer support requests, and beyond. Plugins extend what JIRA can do and can be developed separately from JIRA.

This book is intended for people who want to create and maintain JIRA plugins. Plugins have been a part of JIRA since version 3.0 and a significant community has emerged around them. That community is even large enough to have an annual gathering known as AtlasCamp.

Writing JIRA plugins requires some technical knowledge. This book assumes that you can write simple Java program and are familiar with ideas such as implementing an interface, extending a class and where to find information about the core Java classes. In a few places this book also assumes that you have access to the JIRA source code. This is available from Atlassian with any JIRA license that costs $10 or more.

The intention of this book is to supplement but not repeat the extensive JIRA documentation freely available at http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/JIRA+Docu mentation. Most of the chapters in this book depend upon information in Chapter 1, but can otherwise be read in any order. This book is a companion to Practical JIRA Administration (O’Reilly).

In selecting the different plugins to cover in this book, I was conscious of the different kinds of JIRA plugins that I am asked to implement most frequently as a software toolsmith. I chose the most commonly requested ones. If you can’t find a particular plugin type and think it should be in this book, then please do contact me with more details.