Atlassian debuts new Jira Software Cloud with timeline view, configuration flow
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
Our PM team recently requested we move from Waffle to Jira, since Waffle has no backlog management and Github's is lacking from a PM point of view. As a developer, this is a giant leap backwards.
Jira is a terrible mess of throw spaghetti at the wall and hope it works out. A jumble of all the features you could possibly want, half-assed and thrown together with terrible UX. The data model is non-sensical (everything is shared between projects - if you create a status, a field, an issue type, it becomes the one true object shared by everyone), making the damned thing impossible to configure.
The way kanban boards currently work is that they don't scroll. They adjust their horizontal scaling to shove all the columns on to the screen. Dragging cards between them frequently fails, because when you are dragging, you can end up scrolling and that will knock Jira's awareness of the card's position out of whack. When you drag the card, it greys out the board and highlights the columns you can drop it in in green - which is how I know that Jira's position tracking gets out of whack. After I've dragged to cause an accidental scroll, the column I'm hovering over will fail to highlight, but the one two columns over will highlight.
The whole thing needs to refresh every time you make a change. Or when someone else makes a change, instead of just showing the change you get a little box saying "please refresh me". To see your PRs attached to a card, you have to click into the card, then click into the PR list. It doesn't list which repo each PR belongs to anywhere, so you have to put that in the title yourself if you want to be able to see it from Jira. You can't see review status or comment status from Jira, so you have to click straight through to the PR if you want to see how the conversation has moved.
And yeah, right now, you have to configure your workflow independently of the columns and then attach the the statuses to the columns. Figuring that out took a solid day of clicking around in the nightmarish admin sections. Now that I'm using it and not trying to configure it, it's annoying, it's definitely slowing me down over waffle, but it's... manageable. But god I miss waffle.
These changes, if they actually exist look like they would salve some of these pains... at least a little.
My wishlist for Trello would be a parallel spreadsheet like UI that would make it easy to view and modify details of a large number of different cards in 1 go.
No, that's not the case. If you create any of those new objects, you have to explicitly add it to what you want it to be associated with. New fields have to be added to screens and schemes, new issue types associated with issue type schemes and then to projects, and so forth. None of this happens automatically from the admin side.
If you want to share stuff across projects, you can, but it is in no way a requirement.
> As a developer, this is a giant leap backwards.
The only Jiras I've ever seen suck that hard is when the end users are treated as hostile rather than stakeholders in the deployment. It can be as easy to use or as complicated to use as the people writing your workflows and screens.
That applies to the UI as well. The basic UI, OOTB, is fairly easy to understand. Once you have management dictating 30 different required fields along 50 different projects, each with their own issue types and workflows... yeah, it can get hairy.
> To see your PRs attached to a card, you have to click into the card, then click into the PR list.
This is going to be a bit "you're holding it wrong", but why would you expect to see PRs at the card level rather than the detail view? The agile board is meant to show who and what, not how. PRs would be meaningless noise to the average user of an agile board, not to mention taking up the limited space available on a single card.
Those issues aside, you'll never hear me accuse Jira of being easy to administer. It's a tool that tries to be all things to all people, meaning it will take a non-trivial amount of time to get your head around and have some rough edges.
As a developer lead, these features are extraordinarily useful. I can see the exact state of the card, and all its attached PRs across multiple repos, at a glance. I can jump into any of the PRs to contribute comments, update a review, make a review. I can make use of the PR assignment to assign different people to different parts of the overarching card (assign a different dev to the infrastructure PR, than for the front end PR, for instance) or to assign people to do the review while leaving the executing dev on the primary card.
It's a well designed UX that's trying to be exactly one thing: a highly functioning kanban board tightly integrated with Github. And it shows what good UX design can accomplish.
It's not perfect, but it's miles better than Jira and I'm feeling its lack having to move from Waffle to Jira.
To respond to the first point, I'm reacting to the fact that everything exists in common and must be associated rather than simply created. If someone's created a "Story Points" field already on another project, that's the one true "Story Points" field. If I want a different one for my project, I have to name it something else. And if other people have created a bunch of fields, you can quickly find yourself swimming in a mess.
It feels like Venturebeat messed up a news embargo. My bet is that it'll be announced shortly.
> Plus, there's no release date for these features (which seem like desperately needed improvements) anywhere. We're fixing the blog post link, it'll be up very soon. All the features in the video / article is live. If you haven't yet, please watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHLzrYYlgAU attached to the article, is a good representation of what we have now. Create a new 'next-gen' project within your Jira Cloud instance to try it out.
> A jumble of all the features you could possibly want, half-assed and thrown together with terrible UX.
For 'next-gen' projects, features (like sprints, backlogs, etc) can now be turned on and off when it's appropriate for your team. We regularly listen to feedback and have shipped numerous updates to address some design flaws and bugs for features available.
> The data model is non-sensical (everything is shared between projects - if you create a status, a field, an issue type, it becomes the one true object shared by everyone), making the damned thing impossible to configure.
For 'next-gen' projects, the data model has been reimagined, configuration options are currently scoped to the project. On top of that, configuration is drag-and-drop, much clearer and intuitive. As we build more features and configuration options, we run interviews, perform usability tests, look at in-product feedback, amongst other channels, to make sure that we're not adding unnecessary layers of complexity. If we are, we change and iterate.
In the future we'll be introducing customisable project templates, which allow you to save and share an entire project configuration. Instead of sharing data objects, your teams can reuse or fork templates, making for a better UX. As you can imagine, Jira has many configuration options so we're carefully thinking about how to approach this without the difficulty curve of the classic data model.
> The way kanban boards currently work is that they don't scroll. They adjust their horizontal scaling to shove all the columns on to the screen.
For 'next-gen' projects, we've fixed this. The scrolling is responsive, we've changed how horizontal scaling works and the card updates are near realtime. Our team is working on more performance improvements so expect a snappier experience over time.
> The whole thing needs to refresh every time you make a change.
We've updated the tech stack, this should happen less now with the 'next-gen' projects.
> You can't see review status or comment status from Jira, so you have to click straight through to the PR if you want to see how the conversation has moved.
You can see updates about the branch, commits and PR: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/files/777...
For commenting on PRs, I think that's a fair call - thanks for this feedback. I'll relay this to the team.
> And yeah, right now, you have to configure your workflow independently of the columns and then attach the the statuses to the columns.
In 'next-gen' projects, we've fixed this. The default behaviour is that creating columns on the board updates the workflows. Hence you don't have to run into multiple steps of configuring your workflow, make statuses and add columns. Right now what we have is simple and we plan to build more customisability on the workflow editor but we will be very careful to make sure we don't run into usability problems like what you just mentioned.
Thanks again for the time in leaving valuable feedback for our team.
But this makes Jira much less of an "Oh god, do I have to open that?" and much more of a tool I can actually make use of. Before I was in a state grudging accepting (because our PMs clearly needed it) while dreading the change. Now I can reach of state of peaceful acceptance. I'll make use of the feedback link as I find things. Thanks for the hard work I'm sure the team put in to make this real!
Edit to add: After playing with it more, I would just ask that you, at the least, make that PR icon that shows on the card clickable to jump straight to the PR. Or find someway to expose a list of PRs and their state on the card itself.
On the other hand, I can totally understand people associating Jira with everything that is awful with "Agile", and as you mentioned, micromanagement.
We're constantly working hard to make performance improvements on different fronts.
The new 'next-gen' projects are more performant due to a tech stack update - the interactions and are snappier and updates are near realtime. Come check it out by creating a new 'next-gen' project in your Jira Cloud instance.
Outside of 'next-gen' projects, we're currently working on general performance improvements that will benefit all users.
We're currently making transitions between different parts of the product a lot faster through data pre-load and pre-render techniques. We're also working on optimising the front-end and back-end calls for faster loadtimes in general. We're looking at investing in more datacenters to keep lag times down for you.
Please keep a lookout on performance improvements. It might be hard to notice this day to day, but we have been and are always investing on this.
With age we've incurred some technical debt but rest assured we are unwrangling the complexity everyday so we could optimise our software for you.
Aha is worth looking at on its own, or it integrates with Jira quite deeply yonavoidbsome of these messes.
We can’t promise when (or if) specific features will be deployed in Jira Server, but the Jira Server team is investigating and learning from customer feedback on Cloud.
We’ll be balancing the well-received parts of the Cloud experience with priorities around performance at scale and advanced configuration options in Jira Server.