JIRA: Help us help you.
I was referred to the forums by one of our rabid JIRA users saying that some rabid IDEA users weren't such big fans. I'm here to change that :)
I suppose I should explain myself - I'm one of the two founders of Atlassian - http://www.atlassian.com - the developers of JIRA.
I've also been an IDEA user since it was a JBuilder plugin, JIRA was completely developed using IDEA and every single one of our developers uses IDEA. So I'm not some big stuffy corporate CEO, I'm most certainly a developer at heart.
We pride ourselves on being an open, reactive company - here's your chance to test us.
I can't promise to fix everything in a week, but we will do what we can to make the transition as painless as possible, whilst hopefully showing you why JIRA has so many advantages over the old tracker system :)
I've read through all the threads, and here is what I think the main "pain points" are in the transition to the new system. Once we've worked out a comprehensive list of these problems, we can work to improve things.
Please correct me if I'm wrong or have missed any major items here:
- JIRA has no text formatting in comments
- "I can't understand how to create an issue in JIRA"
- I can't see what issues were fixed in version X?
- I can't search a custom field
- I can't search for issues where build # is between 500 and 508
- JIRA doesn't assign individual modules/components to individual engineers
- Do we need a "two step" system to handle issues in JIRA and the trackers, keeping development issues separate from spurious reports?
- should we duplicate issues between JIRA and the tracker?
- I can't see RSS feeds without assing my username and password
- Can issues be hidden from the public, while sharing others?
- Should a "select group of the community" have access to JIRA?
- How do I get "new / updated issues" in my RSS aggregator?
Did I miss any current problems?
Please feel free to sing out here. I'll respond to these points individually below.
Cheers,
Mike
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I search for duplicates or related issues before filing issues. My main problem
is that JIRA search is inconvenient and slow:
1. I have to select a project to search under. I am using the IDEA tracker,
why am I being asked to search for issues in other components? Additionally,
the default is All Projects. Why would I possibly search for issues in Omea,
Fabrique, IDEA, and ReSharper, all at once? Because I'm curious about JetBrains'
workload lately? It doesn't make sense, each project should have its own
search page.
2. Just to select a project to search under, the entire page has to reload,
which takes 1-5 seconds. However if issue #1 were fixed this would not be
an issue.
3. When the page reloads, some garbage is added to my screen where the Search
box used to be (fields for "Fix for" "In components" "Matches versions"),
and I have to scroll down just to type search terms. I think search terms
are normally the most important aspect of a search, so that field should
be first.
4. When I type search terms I have to prefix every term with + just to get
AND search, like every other search engine does automatically. Who uses OR
search anymore? It doesn't provide good results for any of my searches. (Note:
this was a problem with old Tracker too.)
5. If I want to specify some other constraints, I have to scroll through
more garbage just to get to very commonly used search fields: Status, Resolution.
6. The tiny size (3 lines) of the listboxes makes it hard to scroll through
quickly, to find the value I want.
7. So, most of the time I type search terms, then I press Enter to search,
and it appears that Firefox chooses the "View & Hide" button when I hit Enter.
So, I can't refine my search without clicking "Edit."
Issue #5 might be a configuration issue specific to JB, but I think it's
also a JIRA UI issue - showing a series of 10-20 mostly homogeneous-looking
form fields in a skinny vertical list, does not make it easy to find the
ones I want. I suggest using JavaScript to hide sections like "Dates and
Times" until I click the header to expand the section.
Nick Minutello wrote:
Can't please em all...
Mark
Keith Lea wrote:
Some of the funky XmlRemote request or whatever foo that gmail etc. is
now using could be good here. Imagine gmail style searching for your
issues...
I often use the quick-search in the upper-right corner of JIRA for alot
of things.
alt-q 'some search' enter.
Mark
Absolutely. This thread is testament to that :)
In article <cuu3vp$psi$1@is.intellij.net>,
Mark Derricutt <mark@talios.com> wrote:
No please, thanks. The interface is funky enough, adding more gmail
style stuff would make the display and results unstable to handle on
various platforms. Make it simpler, don't add more junk.
Yes that's nice, but not across projects.
R
I just want to add something, and maybe someone can confirm and resolve
it.
I've gone through the effort of setting up RSS. I've set one up to show
resolved issues on the development project of IDEA with the assumption
that if something is going to be resolved, it's going to be from the
development section, and not from anywhere else.
What that in mind:
1- MAX or JetBrains can you confirm if this is true or false
2- If 1 is true, am I right that I am only seeing 1-2 resolved issues a
day? The level seems really low compared to what we used to see in
Traker. if 1 is false, then I think JetBrains needs to come up with a
select, perhaps with the help of the Jira people, that will guarantee an
RSS feed which will show ALL resolved IDEA issues ALL the time. So if I
have an update on the rss every hour, I can see if anything changed.
The same applies to dev issues, I am just watching anything being added
to it that is in OPEN status, since there seems to be no other logical
status a bug can make it in. Again, 1 and 2 above apply.
Start with simply providing us with links that say, copy this and paste
it in your rss client to follow x, copy that to follow y. We're
spending too much time trying to figure out what's happening, and before
tracker let us have a constant view of what's coming in and out, with
Jira I just feel like I can see, but not that good, kind of like going
to the movie theatre and having a really tall person sitting in front of
you, and you either have to move seats (but you can't) or you just have
to lean and sit uncomfortably for the whole movie. (You also can't ask
him to move down his legs are too long) ;)
R
Robert S. Sfeir wrote:
I have a search that does that, returns 45 or so issues ( idea-dev,
closed or resolved ).
Only, the RSS generated is invalid with some missing quotes around the
width attribute of a TD :(
In article <cuu61s$5na$1@is.intellij.net>,
Mark Derricutt <mark@talios.com> wrote:
:) sorry, is it just me or do you see the irony in this? The one
thing that would work, doesn't :)
R
Hi,
Previous tracker was good for post, not for processing and implementing subjects of posts. So it was good for reporters but not for developers of IDEA.
We all saw how IDEA development speed is slowing with increasing number of RFE posts in old tracker.
TIA,
Dmitry
Mike,
First let me say that, as a secondary target, I don't feel I have the
right to critic JIRA "as a JIRA user". It looks like its primary target
is pretty happy with it, so it must serve them well.
But we are not its primary target. As I wrote earlier :
"In restaurants, they use 2 sets of knives: one for the kitchen, and
one for the clients."
Same here, except that the chef suddenly forced us using its 15 inch
knives for everything.
So everything takes much longer, and we can't do all the things we used
to do everyday.
I have one critic, though: the interface is super bloated. Too much
info, too many fields in 1 screen, too many words, colour everywhere.
Hire a specialist.
You could improve the web experience, like Google did with GMail, but I
doubt you will have the time, if "text formatting", "preview" and
"spellcheck" is still in your backlog after so many years!
>Might I ask (I only used the old tracker a few times), why
submitting an issue in JIRA is any more laborious?
Submitting is a whole process:
1/ Is it a new request?/spotting duplicates
1.1/ I - used to - read all the features and bugs messages threads.
With Thunderbird, it takes no time, fast, keyboard only
=> I knew what was in there.
(Since the move, I went from 100% to 0%! I don't know what others
are asking, replying, commenting; too bad, .. for JB.)
1.2/ "Have I already asked for this?"
- browse the tracker issues with the filter "my features", 1000
results in 1 page.
- Ctrl-F in the browser, on the words I think I would have used. Fast.
Now, I just post in JIRA. If it's a duplicate, too bad.
( I tried looking at "recently added", to stay informed, but I gave up:
it's slow (web), I have to look in 3 places !!, etc..
I'm sure I could cure part of my pain with some configuration and smart
filters, but I shouldn't have to do that. Choose better defaults.)
2/ Posting
JIRA has
- no formatting: a shame
- no preview: a shame
- no spellcheck: an annoyance
That would be acceptable for version 0.9 of a shareware, but not for
version 3.x of a commercial product.
> However, I think you have to realise that not all people actually
I suspect they don't use it daily/intensively, and don't follow the EAP
thoroughly.
Once, I came back after a 3-week holiday. I cleared the few thousands
new messages that in a few hours, over a few days, thanks to the
newsgroups and Thunderbird clean interface and keyboard shortcuts.
>.. the newsgroup interface.
It's not , it's with each half doing
one task very well. Newsgroups are not an optional accessory, they are
half of the solution.
> For me, I much prefer email and RSS interfaces personally! I'm not
trying to convert you,
Don't worry, you won't: If you find threading answers and replies in one
logical thread inferior to RSS, we don't speak the same language.
What really sucks (not your fault):
- in the tracker, no link to the moved JIRA issue
- the original poster is not watching his/her old moved issues in JIRA.
(I have posted hundreds of requests, so I won't do this manually)
To conclude:
The best solution was to keep the for the EAP
members, and synchronize it with JIRA.
Two sets of knives, one for the chefs, one for the clients.
Alain
In article <cuv3ta$fdu$1@is.intellij.net>, Alain Ravet wrote:
Hopefully newsgroup support will be working by the weekend, I've got
JIRA posting new issues to usenet already, I just need to handle
incoming messages.
Incidentally, I just added a heap of RSS feeds from rss.gmane.org to
Thunderbird and see them all nicely threaded ( to a degree, replies to
the same topic thread under the initial message, you don't seem to get
multi-level threading. But its still getting than nothing, works quite
nicely.
Not everyone, yes, but I think all really active EAP members enjoy working with a newsgroup interface. It's just perfect to keep up-to-date with that mass of information that flows constantly into EAP in the form of bug reports and activity.
I, for one, am still crying for not being able to access the tracker using NNTP (even before JIRA -- I'm behind a corporate firewall for the last few months). I'm seriously thinking about writing a small server to read RSS feeds and provide a NNTP interface to them (not sure how hard that would be -- I have no knowledge of the protocol).
In article <slrnd168is.tjo.talios@stumpy.dmz.jungledrum.co.nz>,
Mark Derricutt <talios@gmail.com> wrote:
Wait a minute, how the heck do you see threads in RSS feeds? No such
thing that I've ever seen. Second there is a huge problem Alain hit on
that I forgot to even express: If someone comments on a task in Jira...
I don't see it unless I subscribe to every single issue that gets
submitted. Not in RSS, not in notification, not in anything. I'm not
sure how Mike sees it, maybe because he own his projects he gets
notified of every change. Maybe Mike ought to sign up as a regular user
and see if he can participate in comments to every issue submitted,
because EAP users over here do exactly that, they see someone else's
issue and want to comment on it, or they see someone else's issue and
they want to read the comments. ONLY way to do that right now is to
click on every single new issue submitted and sign up to watch it. If
there is another magic to this, then someone let me know. hey maybe the
solution is that we don't comment anymore, let the feature be what it
is, and complain later after it's implemented ;)
R
While we're moaning about interfaces to information....
Jive really sucks. I read a few messageboards online regularly, most of them use PhpBB, which works really well. Jive is just awful. By far it's worst feature is that it's almost impossible to see new posts. The default threaded display means that all new messages appear at random points in the page, with nothing to distiguish them as new. In big threads like this it's a nightmare. I can't use NNTP because of the firewall.
It also appears to store the time I last looked at the page in the cookie, not in my profile. Thus when I get home, I have to read the same messages again. Normally I could just skip the ones I've read, but combined with gripe 1 above, it's hard to do this without missing content.
There are only 2 items of configuration related to how I see the information. It's ludicrous.
Don't assume that IJ has the latest version of Jive or that it even has
all the features turned on. Jive is very configurable and completely
customizable.
As far as message display, it offers threaded, flat and tree mode. Tree
mode is probably what you want, but it seems to be the least used. In
fact I think it can even be set to only mark messages read when you read
them, instead of going by the timestamps.
Norris Shelton
Sun Certified Java Programmer
Colin Fleming wrote:
>While we're moaning about interfaces to information....
>
>Jive really sucks. I read a few messageboards online regularly, most of them use PhpBB, which works really well. Jive is just awful. By far it's worst feature is that it's almost impossible to see new posts. The default threaded display means that all new messages appear at random points in the page, with nothing to distiguish them as new. In big threads like this it's a nightmare. I can't use NNTP because of the firewall.
>
>It also appears to store the time I last looked at the page in the cookie, not in my profile. Thus when I get home, I have to read the same messages again. Normally I could just skip the ones I've read, but combined with gripe 1 above, it's hard to do this without missing content.
>
>There are only 2 items of configuration related to how I see the information. It's ludicrous.
>
>
Maybe the current version of Jive is the best thing ever, but this one isn't, unless I'm missing something somewhere. For example, in Your Settings/Profile I see exactly 2 options related to display format: Topics per forum listing and Messages per topic listing. Nothing about threaded, flat, tree or any other modes.
I'd love to be corrected on this, or I'd love JetBrains to upgrade...
Colin
Mark Derricutt wrote:
Can I get a copy of the search, or the RSS URL, so that I can look for a
bug?
Cheers,
Mike
It was kinda write-only ;)
Robert S. Sfeir wrote:
Actually, I should correct myself here - I see "threaded", not threads.
Matching the same subject under each other. Not quite the level of real
threads, but for the most part, its better than not.
Also, an RSS item in theory could include a custom "in reply to" element
that points to the GUID of the original message, this could then be
implemented in clients to allow them to handle threaded displays much
like email clients do currently.
I mentioned this to Mike as well, awhile I had put in a request for a
comment RSS feed for a project. I'll be writing up a simple listener to
generate a comment feed as well with my current JIRA plugin projects.
This should suffice for this I reckon...
On the other side of this, notification schemes -can- be set up in JIRA
to email you on any comment, new issue etc. etc.
On a system such at IntelliJ's where they're likely to have ALOT more
users than a traditional closed JIRA install, where not everyone would
want to receive EVERYTHING - it gets a bit trickier.
The user really wants to be able to subscribe to a project, not just a
issue.
Mark
Marcus Brito wrote:
Don't code your own - install NNTP-Rss
http://www.methodize.org/nntprss/
Mark
I have been playing around with Jira for the past few days. I have created some issues and done some searches and created some saved filters.
Overall, I like Jira's interface. There are some rough spots like unnecessary fields on the create issue.
But by far the most confusing part is the three different buckets of issues: feedback, backlog, and development. Actually, if feedback, backlog, and development where three different views into the same bucket of issues, then I dont' think there would be any issues. That's how I thought it worked.
I had created several new isseus in feedback, if I then clicked Preset Filter->Reported by me, it would show all the issues I created.
I came back the next day and clicked Filter->Reported by me, and there was nothing. NOTHING!
That's when I realized the issues must be getting moved around from feedback to backlog to development? I now had to goto the development project and click Filter->Reported by me, to see my issues.
For me, that is the most annoying part (by far) of jira so far.
I don't see why JetBrains didn't use a single project and have 'feedback'/'backlog'/'development' be a custom field which default to 'feedback'.
That doesn't solve the problem. With tracker we got notified when a thread we were watching had something new, but with JIRA we have to go look for what has changed. Your "solution" would work if you didn't have to subscribe to the filter every day. That is not a solution to the stated problem because we still have to initiate a request for changes instead of having them automatically sent to us. I want to be able to do what I could do in tracker, namely tell the system to inform me when a topic I am watching has something new.
In article <slrnd179hc.43h.talios@stumpy.dmz.jungledrum.co.nz>,
Mark Derricutt <talios@gmail.com> wrote:
And require to yet again change some other piece of software to
accomodate the way Jira does it.
That assumes we're IN idea when we're watching the EAP. No one has
brought up the fact so far that sometimes we're not in idea, but working
on something else and keep a second eye on the nntp client for anything
new coming in. Further, and this is not a knock on your effort with the
plugin, it is valuable, we're going to have to test your plugin, hence
more time testing and reporting... I feel for you because you have to do
it. Hopefully you'll get help from the JB and Jira teams.
Yes I did do that, once a day, at some unknown time so far because it
didn't look like I could tell it what time to schedule me for, unless
it's at the time you actually setup the filter in which case I'll get it
at 11:00 PM tonight. Pretty useless I think.
Indeed it does.
Finally someone sees it... well... ALMOST, the user wants to subscribe
to a Category, NOT a project (well that too if they choose to). I want
to follow all 3 projects in the IntelliJ IDEA category. The problem is
in fact this simple. Nothing more, nothing less. Subscribe to the
categories by RSS, or otherwise, and show me EVERYTHING happening in
this category via RSS, AND let me search based on CATEGORIES NOT
PROJECTS. That's the problem. The only thing I can see from a user
perspective that is useful about a category is that it groups projects.
Nothing more... waste of UI and code horsepower if you ask me, if indeed
that's all a category is for. it doesn't seem to simplify the
interface, it just uses more space to list projects in groups. It's not
collapsible, not searchable, not even mentioned anywhere else in the UI.
(I am not referring to the component category, I am referring to when
you click on browse projects and you look at the list of ALL projects,
THAT category)
R
Robert S. Sfeir wrote:
>>I mentioned this to Mike as well, awhile I had put in a request for a
>>comment RSS feed for a project. I'll be writing up a simple listener to
>>generate a comment feed as well with my current JIRA plugin projects.
Er no. This comments feed plugin is a JIRA plugin, -NOT- an IDEA plugin.
I should have made that more clear. My bad.
As well as the IDEA plugin, I'm working on two JIRA plugins:
- RSS Comment Feed Generator
- NNTP bridge
Well, I don't -have- to do it - the whole plugin biz for me started
because I had a geekish need. ( although, now Atlassian is sponersoring
me, technically I do... ).
Subscription to filters is a little different to the notification scheme
method thou. And I aggree with not being able to set the time of the
subscription ( which seems to default to the time you created it as you
say - I think an issue was raised about this awhile ago ).
The problem is that everyone seems things differently, and providing a
solution that works for everyone, is hard.
JIRA enterprise has project groups, so you could lump all three IDEA
projects into the JavaGroup, although i've played with that as I only
have a Pro install here at work.
Mark
1) If you are interested in a particular issue (thread), you can "watch" the issue (link on LHS). You then get emailed whenever anything changes with that issue status - comments added, changes in priority/scheduling - whatever.
2) The filter subscription is like a report. The results of a search get emailed to you - depending on the frequency you specify.
You have quick links on the project dashboard to the most common (e.g. "added recently" or "updated recently") - and its just a matter of subscribing to it to get a daily (or every 20 mins if you wish) email.
Think of it as a daily digest...
-Nick
When you log into Jira, save your cookie - you wont have to log in ever again....
-Nick
But what does that do Mark? What is the benefit of grouping the
projects? Normally, like in idea, is to make groups you can collapse so
you can clear up the project pane and have a clearer view of things, and
you can right click on a group and compile all the modules in that
group, search by group etc...
It seems that Jira is just one step too short to resolve a prevalent
issue for everyone (well almost but most) in that the search requires
searching 3 projects. If groups (or categories in this case as they're
called) had a feature to search groups, that would be much easier than
searching 3 projects for possible duplicates. The other thing it does
is that the search result, can be saved as a filter, which can then give
you notification, or the search result can be used as an rss feed to
watch all 3 projects at the same time.
This is what tracker always gave us. Flat out search, and it didn't
matter if it was a feature or a bug or an exception... search.
You see what I'm saying?
Alain said it best... right tool for engineers, wrong tool to drive eap
the way JB does. Having that search possibility and your nntp work
would get us 80% of the way there I think.
R
On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 at 01:28 GMT, Robert S. Sfeir <no_mail@jetbrains.com> wrote:
It means those who only want to see that group, i.e. you don't care about
.NET you can hide them. Someone else was asking about that sort of thing
( or more, I only want IDEA/Java things, not everything ).
I wrote on this last night, but so far no seems to have commented on it.
JetBrains -chose- to go the three project route. The fault there is NOT
Jira, but JetBrains. Using a custom project level field would have
easiely solved the problem, so would assigning three three meta-versions.
Again - the custom fields or versions method would provide for this.
The nntp bridge is being built live from the subversion repository (
automated builds baby ), but so far doesn't do anything beyond post a
message to this eap group ( severs and group is currently hardcoded ) with
configuration stuff wanting to be commited when I get back to the home
office.
Hopefully I should have something tonight which may be a good start for
doing some testing with.
One thing I will note thou, this is probably the first time JIRA has been
put up against such a large scale community - so teething issues arn't
really unexpected. And well, it may just well proove that JIRAs not up to
-this- task, but without actually TRYING - one would never know.
I do know that JIRAs plugin architecture should make the things we all
need possible thou.
Mark
Mark, thanks for all your patience in explaining all this. I can see
you are as passionate about IDEA as you are about Jira.
R
On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 at 02:47 GMT, Robert S. Sfeir <no_mail@jetbrains.com> wrote:
And I don't even WORK for them ;) Maybe I need a life ;)