Marketplace is anti-small addons?

Question

So I submitted a simple, but well requested addon (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-35124 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-30197https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1676) for Jira over the weekend to the marketplace (for FREE).  Today I checked to see if it was approved, and it said rejected with the message:

"Contains 'junk' assets which are not descriptive i.e repeated images of sudo with text sudo. Please see our branding guidelines: https://developer.atlassian.com/display/MARKET/Branding+your+add-on"

And while the response is probably true, this addon has literally ZERO visual elements, it allows admins to 'sudo' and issue REST commands as other users without needing their credentials (see https://bitbucket.org/daviderickson/jirasudo).  So why on earth does the marketplace force you to submit 3 highlights and screenshots of your addon when they should certainly know that there may not even be 3 screenshots worth of functionality in valuable addons submitted to the marketplace?

That alone is bad enough, but I thought to myself maybe I could be smug and take some pictures of http headers, or json responses to get past this hurdle, but when I went to edit the Details of my addon there isn't even a way for me to edit the highlights to 'fix' and resubmit.

Am I the only one that thinks this isn't exactly embracing the community that is fixing deficiencies and adding value to your products?

Dave Meyer · Answer

Hi David,

Thanks for bringing this up for discussion. I went into detail about the original reasoning behind our screenshot and highlight requirements in an answer to this question, but I think your question deserves its own response.

First, we are absolutely, without qualification, committed to making the Marketplace useful and accessible to every developer in our community. We're grateful to every developer, small and large, that is willing to take time to contribute and help make our products better.

There are two groups whose needs we try to meet: customers who are finding, discovering, evaluating, and purchasing add-ons for their Atlassian products, and add-on developers who are sharing their work for those customers to use. The single goal of every requirement we impose on developers contributing to the Marketplace is to improve the experience of customers finding and installing those add-ons.

I agree that for "simple" plugins, especially those that don't modify the JIRA UI, requiring three "highlights" with accompanying screenshots can seem like an unnecessary burden. But our goal is to ensure a high standard of quality for every add-on's profile so that customers browsing the Marketplace have a consistent experience going from page to page. I'll be the first to admit that this will end up as overkill in some cases, but the alternative is to lower the bar for every add-on in the Marketplace, which degrades the experience for our customers.

The goal of the "tagline" and three highlights with accompanying screenshots is to encourage a concise, easily digestible summary of what an add-on does. Even if the add-on's functionality can be described in a single paragraph of text, breaking it up into three highlights will likely be more comprehensible to a user visiting the page with little or no context.

In your case, I would say even three examples of REST calls (just screenshots of your shell) that take advantage of your plugin would be enough to quickly convey what a user could accomplish with your plugin. There are three sentences in the first paragraph of your readme on Bitbucket – those could be your three highlights.

As we continue to iterate on the Marketplace site design, we will absolutely consider more flexible designs that would allow developers to release simpler add-ons with less overhead. We're aware of the frustration and I'm hopeful we can come up with a solution that gives you what you need without sacrificing the visual consistency and clarity of the Marketplace site.

At the end of the day, we want to serve both you and the customers that both of us are writing software for. Thanks for being a member of our community. Feel free to contact me directly at any time: dmeyer@atlassian.com

Cheers,

Dave

Timothy · Answer

but when I went to edit the Details of my addon there isn't even a way for me to edit the highlights to 'fix' and resubmit

I've faced this before. The process is to submit a new version with the medias. Why don't you make a Youtube video too? Gives them less of an excuse not to accept the add on.