Why Statuspage chose Jira's next-gen project template and isn't looking back!

[#1]

Andrew Burleson, a Team Leader for 12 developers working on Atlassian’s Statuspage tool, recently moved some of his teams from Jira Software’s classic to next-gen project template and took the time to answer a few questions about the experience. Next-gen projects include powerful roadmaps and allow teams to create and update their issues, projects, issue types, and workflows faster and easier than ever, without impacting other teams or asking an Administrator for permission.

Read on to learn about how Andrew made the decision to use next-gen, how easy it was to migrate, and what new features his teams can’t live without!

What did your original classic project look like?

Our “Project” was actually all of the work that encompassed 6 smaller teams and was a lot of activity to hang onto a single classic Jira project. To manage this, we split all of our “actual” projects into Epics, which worked pretty well since it’s easy to filter, plus you get the color coded badge.

What prompted you to look into next-gen projects?

Splitting my engineering team in two led us to break up our single big project into multiple smaller ones, and while some teams stuck with classic projects by reusing the configuration from our original, for the new teams I thought it would be fun to try next-gen.

How did you (and your team) decide that next-gen was a good fit?

We had concerns about syncing issues between the old and the new projects and realized that we’d need a solution for migrating everything in-flight, as well as tracking ongoing work in old and new projects since the original one would still serve as our shared backlog.

After realizing our limiting factors, the whole evaluation and decision-making process was pretty simple didn’t take long, maybe 90 minutes in one sitting:

1. I made a test project and added sample issues and epics, then tried the roadmap, sprint, and board views.

2. I set up some fake issues in the old classic project moved them to the test project.

3. I set up some automation rules in Automation for Jira to see if some of the synchronization between the boards could be automated.

After setting it up, I felt confident that next-gen was viable for us and called over my two feature leads to demo my “research.” They both agreed that it looked good and that they’d use next-gen projects for their teams.

How did migration go?

Overall, it was shockingly easy and in the end it only took 5-10 minutes to configure new next-gen projects, and the bulk issue mover was a breeze. It was really easy to filter the issues I wanted moved, and Jira did a great job mapping between the old and new projects. I didn’t even have to change anything, just confirm that it was all correct.

What did you notice in your next-gen project right away?

Overall the UI feels much more polished. In particular, project configuration is a million times better. It feels quite easy to customize issue types and set up a custom workflow, which is really useful.

I was also surprised by how helpful the views updating in realtime is. We have a lot of situations where people sit around a Jira screen and I’m pretty used to seeing “someone changed the board, refresh to see changes.” It’s neat to forget about all that and just see the other persons work appear live.

Have any new features stood out as being exceptionally useful?

Roadmaps are great! Now that we’ve got one team per project, we don’t use epics to group our “actual projects” instead use epics more as they were intended, to represent the chunks within a particular project that are being worked on.

(Note: not all visible roadmap features are available at this time.)

The board is also much improved overall and the new projects feel faster. I’m really glad that labels show up on issues, and being able to just add a column or move it around is neat, too.

How did the teams take the change?

The leads feel more ownership over the board now, and that has helped them to better organize. All of the people who like this stuff were excited about the change, and since we’ve moved I’ve heard a lot of positive “oh look at that!” kind of feedback and very few complaints. People who don’t really care about the process (as long as it works) weren’t as interested. From that crowd, a “yawn” is as good as it gets.

Would you consider going back to a classic template?

Losing roadmaps and the realtime view would be really hard. Aside from that, it’s clear that next-gen is the future, and we don’t want to be stuck in the past while all the cool new stuff happens there, so I can’t see us ever moving back.

What advice do you have for teams that are considering switching to next-gen?

The overall experience is better and migrating was easy. Unless you have a complex workflow or depend on a feature that next-gen doesn’t yet have, you should go for it!

If you're interested in Jira's next-gen templates and want to learn more about getting started and best practices, get to know next-gen with our onDemand webinar!

[Ashlee Toney]

It would be awesome to get some video tutorials around next-gen..I am trying to use it in a very basic way currently and it seems like such a pain...so I have chosen NOT to move away from Classic for the time being. It also seems like it is very limited in functionality...however, I keep seeing articles like this where it seems to have more functionality or more useful features. If I could see how to set some things up, maybe I would try using it like he did.

[Adam Lopez]

With Next-Gen are you able to run more than one sprint at a time yet? 

[Andrew Zykan]

How did the roadmap get setup like that with the flow and task break out in roadmap view? 

[Alistair Hopkins]

Hiya

Keen to use next gen but the reporting is so limited - when will the full set of reports be available?

The roadmap view is exactly what we need but we don't want to lose things like version report, which is vital for understanding overall progress

A

[Jonathan Oldhams]

How can we access that roadmap on Jira cloud? The ability to  usually links epics and group tasks on the same visually view is a feature we have been waiting for a long time!

please can you confirm how this functionality can be accessed? 

[Andrew Burleson]

@Andrew Zykan I had the same question actually. I asked the Jira team and they said the screenshot is showing the newest version of the roadmap feature which is arriving in Jira Cloud (on next-gen projects) sometime this fall.

[Paddy]

When using agile/scrum, next-gen projects feel heavily feature incomplete. We've been using them since February, and every week we're searching online how to do basic functions, only to find they're currently not supported. 

I hope the Jira team can prioritise a little better on function Vs form first. There's still hope.

[Isaac Chua]

We have been using this for months and we are getting increasingly annoyed at how incomplete the next-gen project is.

• You cannot start multiple sprints.
• You cannot add text area fields to issues which means if you need to document more descriptive things on an issue (such as preconditions, test steps, etc.), you cannot.
• You cannot create boards that span multiple next-gen projects, and so we can't create cross-project views for planning across teams.
• Epics do not work like classic Epics, such that we cannot use JQL to find issues that belong to an Epic with the Epic Link field.
• It is SO SLOW compared to classic projects.

We are looking to move back to classic projects as we deem this migration to next-gen a failure.

[Chris Cooper-Tonge]

We recently migrated back to a scrum classic project from next-gen due to some fundamental features not being in place that the team need.

The reporting on next-gen is behind the capabilities of the classic projects especially when focusing on sprints. There's also a noticeable difference in the number of reports that are available to use compared to classic. 

The live editing and roadmap features are really good however do not compensate enough currently for the lack of reporting which impacts our ability to share success and keep everyone on the same page without much data manipulation. 

More video tutorials on utilising the new features properly would be useful, blog posts like this are a great way of communicating to.

No doubt we will be migrating back at some point in the future and we'll be closely monitoring releases over the next couple of months.

[Lars Aalberts]

Reading this comments i found out that there are multiple functions still missing, for me and my team starting multiple sprints is fundamental so because i was reading these comments i now know i shouldn't migrate yet. 

I think that the attlassian team should be more open about what is still missing/work in progress and maybe a little roadmap so we can see where you guys will go from here. If you don't do this you will get annoyed users, as you can see in these comments.

Thanks for sharing @Isaac Chua 

[Isaac Chua]

@Lars Aalbertsto be fair they did document parallel sprints here, but at the time when we migrated over, this wasn't available/apparent to us. Furthermore, the actual tiny operational matters (such as the available field types and quirks of Epics) are not apparent or documented, and will turn out to be a nasty surprise.

[Corinne Dent]

Hi @Alistair Hopkins - wanted to jump in about your reports question. This is an area we're working fast and furious to address. We just released the Cumulative Flow Diagram report (https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Next-gen-articles/Introducing-our-first-Kanban-report-for-next-gen-projects/ba-p/1152420) and are working to bring more reporting to next-gen soon. 

[Josh Frank]

@Andrew Zykan  reinforcing what @ab said, the roadmap screenshot is showing a few unreleased Jira Software roadmap features. Stayed tuned for an announcement coming soon :).

@Jonathan Oldhams , In order to access the roadmap, you just need to create a new project with our next-gen template. You’ll see an icon for the roadmap in the sidebar.

@Paddy  @Chris Cooper-Tonge  @Lars Aalberts, Thanks for your feedback. We’re currently working on a program to keep people better informed about new features we’ve shipped and what’s on the horizon. I’ll update the community as soon as we have something to share on this front. 

[NotJoel]

@Ashlee Toney and @Chris Cooper-Tonge  We have a few videos out now that you can watch to get a better idea of how to get started with next-gen projects! I would recommend first checking out our onDemand webinar that specifically covers getting started in next-gen: https://www.atlassian.com/webinars/software/best-practices-and-getting-started-in-jira-cloud

This YouTube playlist that we put together also covers a wide variety of features and how to use them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaD4FvsFdarQ2TU7D6I0hbuwvz2-oqr5q

[Ashlee Toney]

@NotJoel --  I will check those out this week. Thank you!

[Chris Cooper-Tonge]

@Josh Frank / @NotJoel Thanks for your responses. I'll check out the videos and keep an eye out for more post on here.

[Krishan]

Trust without formal support and established training videos its very difficult configuring . To em it seems like the tool and its behavior is severely handicapped. 

[Ivan Teong]

@Salesforce Thanks for your great input! We are working hard on developing more features for next-gen, it will be great if we can be in touch in future to understand more of your team's situations!

As for speed, it's one of our top priorities and would love to know why it comes across as slow. If you are keen to arrange a time for a chat, please feel free to email me at iteong@atlassian.com !

@Chris Cooper-Tonge Thanks for considering next-gen projects! You'd be pleased that we are kicking off work on the burndown chart this week! If you're keen to be part of our early access when we ship to dogfooding instances in a few weeks, please let me know! Also, happy to organise a chat if you're keen - shoot me an email!