Find old projects in Jira

To keep Jira clean can be real challenging. I prefer to use just a handful of workflows, a small set of statuses, a couple of permission schemes and so on. What is see a lot is that projects, when they are finished, are not properly cleaned. A project should finish with a clean Jira project, issues are either new or done and all boards are gone. To view all ancient boards is not something that is easily done in Jira itself. So get some database access (I like HeidiSQL for this task) and run a query:

SELECT p.pkey AS PROJECT_KEY, p.pname AS PROJECT_NAME, MAX(i.UPDATED) AS LAST_UPDATED FROM jiraissue i INNER JOIN project p ON p.ID = i.PROJECT GROUP BY p.pname, p.pkey ORDER BY LAST_UPDATED

This will give you three columns, with the project key, the name of the project and the last updated date of the most recent updated issue, sorted with the oldest at the top. I use this to find the people who were responsible for the projects and then help them to clean. This will leanly (5S) help us to make Jira more an organisational standard and is part of the first 5S step, sorting.

Orthogonality and the DRY Principle

This is an article fomr 2003. They make fair points that are still applicable to developers now.

1. All programming is maintenance; only the first ten minutes code is new, the rest is maintenance.
2. Don't repeat yourself; every piece of knowledge in the development of something should have a single representation.
3. Code generators; if you expect a lot of volatility, a code generator can be a good investment.
4. Orthogonality;  things that are not related conceptually should not be related in the system

Read the full article: http://www.artima.com/intv/dry.html