Why we built Days Elapsed Traffic Light plugin

We have a customer using VertygoSLA plugin to track the SLA for requests in their JIRA, but VertygoSLA was acquired by Atlassian to be embedded with JIRA Service Desk. There were 3 options available:

1. To switch to JIRA Service Desk
2. To find other suitable SLA plugins
3. To build our own SLA plugin

We decided to build our own Days Elapsed Traffic Light plugin due to the following considerations:

• Need to calculate the number of working days. As the business requests can take many days to resolve, displaying 9 days elapsed is less mathematically challenging compared to 72 hours passed
• Ability to flag out issues that is going to exceed the SLA soon. The yellow traffic light is helpful for alerting users
• To be able to retain the SLA information from the old requests

Setting up the Traffic Light custom fields

The setup for the Traffic Light custom fields is pretty simple with a couple of steps

1. For every VertygoSLA custom field, we added a corresponding Traffic Light custom field with the same name 
2. The working calendars have to be added to define the working days and non working days. In order to cater to departments with different calendars, we introduced the concept of country calendars and organisation calendars. This will alleviate the administrators’ tasks of having to update each calendars individually
   
3. The mappings have to be defined to specify the thresholds and conditions for the SLA to be applied
4. Post functions are added into the workflows to start and stop the Traffic Light Timers
   

Migrating the VertygoSLA data

The patching was the most time-consuming part as it was done incrementally over different JIRA projects. We built a patcher module that can select the issues to patch.

1. The patching was done during off-peak hours to avoid disruption to the users
2. The patcher will read the VertygoSLA information and find out the duration of SLA timer
3. Using the number of days elapsed, the traffic light colour is determined
4. The information is then populated into the corresponding Traffic Light custom field
5. We created dashboards with our Multiple Filters Chart Gadget for the users to verify the results
6. After verification, the VertygoSLA custom fields were deleted