About the Site

While Jira (and to a lesser extent Confluence) have a near-limitless potential for good, there’s definitely room for bad and ugly in there as well. In my years mucking about I’ve created my share of each, and ended up writing a lot of documentation as a result.

In July 2023, my mom’s cancer returned and I spent several months being both too worried to accomplish much of anything and in pretty desperate need of a distraction. I ended up spending a lot of this time organizing, updating, and re-writing my Jira notes, and Jiramancy was born.

This site is my attempt to create a central place for this documentation; both to stop me needing to re-write things I lose track of and in case there’s others out there who could benefit from it. I’ve got a lot going on and an editing problem, so it will pretty much always be under construction to some extent.

The site is split into a couple of sections:

• ‘Jiramancy’ is stuff that will be broadly applicable to people running instances and maybe the upper tiers of power users; tips and tricks, best practices, and other ways to squeeze the most out of your Jira experience.

• ‘Agile Practices’ covers the processes and other behaviors outside of the tool that, when run well in parallel, mesh to create some powerful benefits.

• The ‘Cannery’ contains documentation I’ve written primarily with end users in mind, covering the basic concepts and features of Jira.

• ‘Add-ons' has reviews and other information about the plugins I find useful (and in some cases, essential) to a good instance.