Best Practices for Building and Sharing Apps

[Justin Meyer]

I've built two open source projects that integrate with Jira:

• A statistical monte-carlo autoscheduler for building project plans
• A ppt reporting tool

I want to make these as useful to the community as possible.  How should I go about this?

I have a few related follow-up thoughts/questions:  

• I assume the best way would be to create an app in the Jira marketplace.  Are there suggestions on how to design apps that folks like?  I've been loosely following Jira's design system.
• What's the best way to find and market to users? I'd like to find a group of people who are interested in guiding the development of these tools.  Are there particular forums for this?

Ultimately, I'm looking for advice on how to build an app that folks (besides me) use. Thanks!

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

Hi @Justin Meyer 

I understand that you have created some open-source apps for Jira and want to know more about to best share these with other users.  I'd recommend following the steps in Get started on Marketplace.   This guide will show you how to create a partner account, which is needed in order to be able to create a listing in our Marketplace site and Register you apps.

I suggest this method because if you create a marketplace listing for your apps, this will allow users to find your app directly within Jira.

There are also other guides over on https://developer.atlassian.com that might be helpful here, even if you elect not to use our Marketplace, that site has lots of useful information for building apps for both our Data Center and Atlassian Cloud based products.

Are there suggestions on how to design apps that folks like?

Also to focus on the design aspect of your question, check out https://atlassian.design/ as this site is made to help developers provide their apps within the frameworks of our products.

What's the best way to find and market to users?

If you create a marketplace listing, you'd be required to submit a uniquely named key for your app.  That key can then be used to also create a tag within our Community site here.  That might be useful as other app vendors have used that key so to tag any questions/discussions about a particular app.  For example, if you look at the Scriptrunner for Jira app, under the Support tab there is a link to See existing Q&A in Atlassian Community

That link makes sure that new questions created there have the tag

addon-com.onresolve.jira.groovy.groovyrunner

That way the partner that created that app can just watch for content with that tag to engage with users of their app.

I hope that helps.

Andy

[Justin Meyer]

Thanks Andy.  This was very helpful!

[Justin Meyer]

Andy,

   If I might ask you another question ... I've also created a free and open-source training for program management with jira that I attempted to let people know about ( https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Training-Certification/Agile-Program-Management-with-Jira-Free-Training-Course/td-p/2578623 ), but it seems this was removed. Are there more appropriate places to share resources like this with folks?

Thanks again!

[Andy Heinzer]

@Justin Meyer It looks like the system flagged that post as spam.   I have removed that post from the quarantine.  It should now appear again on the site.

[Jack Brickey]

Interesting question @Justin Meyer . I have tagged for review and guidance.