Practical JIRA Administration

Chapter 6. Custom Fields

Overview

One of the primary purposes of an issue tracker is to collect organized data, and custom fields let you personalize that data. If you need to track how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, JIRA allows you to create a custom field for that. (It would be a number field, presumably, though number field values in JIRA have an upper limit of 100 trillion.) The appeal of creating custom fields is understandable, and it makes sense that as an organization grows and adopts JIRA for varied purposes, the number of custom fields grows along with it.

The problem is that custom fields are like glazed doughnuts—they always seem like a good idea at the time, but if you continue thinking that way in perpetuity then you’re sure to witness a reduction in speed. The number of custom fields in JIRA is one of the most significant factors in the performance of a JIRA instance. You can see the details of Atlassian’s performance testing of JIRA 6.4 in their enterprise documentation at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ENTERPRISE/Scaling+JIRA.

There are certainly other factors that can affect performance, such as the number of issues, number of concurrent users, and behavior (or lack thereof) of add-ons. But for most administrators, many of these factors are difficult to directly control. Managing the number of custom fields in your instance is the most straightforward way to control the performance of JIRA.

In addition to improving performance, custom ...