In a Summiter’s life it’s sometimes difficult to choose from the abondance of offered conferences. If some of them are large popular shows, like Atlassian co-founders’ keynotes (Steve Jobs has well secured the take-over), some others appeared to be more confidential, and by the way, their titles sound sometimes quite funny.

This Friday afternoon 3.00 PM, you could feel the end of the Summit in the atmosphere … while consulting the conferences planning, I am surprised by the title of one of them : “Workflow Magic”. As my curiosity got aroused, I have installed myself in one of the front-row pouffe of the “JIRA everywhere” room. (this can’t be made up)

Jonathan Doklovic is in charge. He is known for being the developer of the JIRA’s Worflow Designer among other things.

Today he chose to talk to us about the difficulties to carry the XML formatted workflows from one JIRA instance to another. He has started by an inventory of the blocking issus : non agreement id’s with status, unexisting screens or custom fields, missing functions from third-party plugin … I just wanted to say : “thanks Jon to rememorate me my JIRA’s integrator daily problems while I was until then in a Silicon kind of blissful feeling “. But I held myself telling me “if he’s talking about that, maybe he has a solution” …

And THE solution will come… with a video introducing  JIRA Workflow Sharing Plugin, sparking scenes of great celebration, the audiance was ready to canonize Jonathan (inspite of there is no religious nature in the Atlassian’s events).

The solution is based on the generation of an archive that embeds, in addition to the XML workflow :

• Copies of all the plugins (JARs) that classes would be mentioned in the XML backup
• Declarations of these same plugins (JSON)
• Declarations of all the custom fields (JSON) of the XML backup
• Declarations of all the screens (JSON) of the XML backup
• A potential formatting in the workflow designer ( we will appreciate not having to re-do this all this fastidious work)

The upload of this package in you new instance will therefore be able to handle the id’s state mapping, the custom fields and the screens existing under the same name.

• The creation of the unexisting ones
• The invitation for installing missing plugins (insuring on the Market place of their compatibility with your JIRA version)
• An alert for all the plugins for which no compatible versions were found
• The suppression in the XML backup of any workflow function that would require a missing plugin
• A roll-back of all operations (plugins install, parameter change) if the upload has failed
• The notification of all changes made (through a report and mails sends to all admins of the instance)

Of course there will probably be some errors and maybe some unsupported cases ( for exemple, it hasn’t been mentionned anywhere the management of groups and roles that could be missing in the workflow conditions …) but we can notice Atlassian’s effort to enrich this functionality that remained static during a long time.

This evolution is part of the more large ambition to integrate this new workflow format into the Market Place: as well as the other plugins ( that we should now name add-on by the way), you will be able to install those workflow templates .(exemple of an ITIL service desk workflow)

Thank you Jonathan !!!