Description:   Atlassian JIRA Implementation

High Level Summary:

The client was implementing JIRA for managing and tracking tasks performed by a number of Cyber Security teams. In addition to the JIRA implementation, there were complimentary integrated implementations of Confluence and HipChat.

 

Objective:

Primary objective was to review the ‘as-is’ implementation and align it with the work methodologies and requirements for three teams.  Using a simplified business process mapping and gap analysis strategy we created and refined key workflows and status types to enable workload management and timely reporting.  We implemented Backlog concepts, daily stand-up meetings, and Kanban for visualization.

Secondary objectives included standardizing concepts and practices.  The utilization ‘Definition of Ready’ concepts defined dependencies to be completed before work can commence, ‘Acceptance Criteria’ concepts defined core task output requirements, ‘Definition of Done’ standardized the concept of describing a task as ‘done’ within the team.  All concepts were backed by JIRA customization to facilitate checklists to provide visualization and reporting metrics.

Tertiary objective was to create and deploy an HA infrastructure into a VMWare ESXI 6 environment.  Infrastructure was architected using NGINX as a Proxy/Load Balancer with JIRA, Confluence and HipChat instances running behind, backed by a PostgreSQL database on CentOS 7.  All data volumes were LUKS encrypted, and traffic encrypted with SSL and properly signed certificates.  Backups were performed daily via Bash Scripts capturing application, data, and database to a remote backup server.