Influencing Atlassian's release cycle We encourage our customers to vote on issues

[tinyCabbage]

Influencing Atlassian's release cycle 
We encourage our customers to vote on issues that have been raised in our public JIRA instance,http://jira.atlassian.com. Please find out if your request already exists - if it does, vote for it. If you do not find it you may wish to create a new one.

Just a load of Bullshit, There's tickets in that JIRA board that has hundreds of votes, one of the highest, that's open since 2002. https://jira.atlassian.com/issues?jql=status = Open ORDER BY created ASC, updated DESC

I personally have had enough of the lack of action for Atlassian in solving bugs/ key feature request I as a the admin for our company's devops solutions have raised or voted on what others have raised. 

I no longer believe our votes, request have any impact at all in the software. For a company who goes round promoting agile development, their lack of actions on customer feedback is quite shocking, reminiscent of the old waterfall days. Even the support request we've raised are often replied with by engineers with very little knowledge of the product, 9/10 the answer is you need to pay one of our expert to help you, just pointless.

edit: Previously people states "votes" are just one of the influences, well in reply to that, I would really like to know when the last time out votes actually changed the direction of the software. It's feels like, it's nothing but a marketing gimmick to make you feel like you have influence / Atlassian is listening to feedback. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

>Previously people states "votes" are just one of the influences, well in reply to that, I would really like to know when the last time out votes actually changed the direction of the software

I spoke to an Atlassian who is on the Service Desk team about exactly this a few weeks ago.  The votes on "being able to see other calls from people in my organisation" significantly changed their planned roadmap.

In the core of JIRA, many years ago, I had a similar conversation which revealed that Atlassian were pretty much never going to do JRA-9, but the volume of votes behind it kept pushing it to the front of the queue.  Without the voting, it would only have got done if big customers had yelled loudly enough and at the time, they were yelling louder about a lot of other things.

[tinyCabbage]

2 instances? What about the other thousands of request that has hundreds of vote on them? What about that one from 2002 that still hasn't been done?

Isn't the whole idea of agile; is the ability to be more reactive, delivering things customer wants faster? So we as consumers are voting for things we want and Atlassian are ignoring going we know better than you (Doesn't that remind you of the dark old days of waterfall, where customer want one thing and IT does another?).

"much never going to do JRA-9, but the volume of votes behind it kept pushing it to the front" -Are we suppose to organise a protest every time someone raise a new request otherwise they get ignored?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, there are lots more instances, I just mentioned the two I have directly seen voting influence, to show you that I have directly seen voting matter.

JRA-9 was never protested about as strongly as other issues - it's an example of where Atlassian didn't rate it but voting made it matter to them.  In fact, protesting gets you even less results than voting - if you look back over the history, you'll see issues with vast amounts of noise, but low votes don't get far, whereas the ones with higher votes do.

Even the release nots mention it directly sometimes - "we've fixed 15,000 votes" rather than "three big issues".

As for the backlog.  It's big.  Lots of stuff flows into it, and Atlassian simply can't do all of them.  They use voting to help prioritise it (they don't use noise or protests)

In other words, what Bryan said on https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/110373 remains true. 

[tinyCabbage]

Of all the tickets that matters to me, that have been raised by others or raised by myself, not one has been done. 

My impression on what is happening is, Atlassian does what they want and sometimes they so happen to be in line with some of the feature requests, not becuase they directly wanted to implement something the customer wanted. Whether its right or not, that's my impression of it. 

 Are votes what determine the priority of a feature? This part here is full of bs, if they're getting all these other feedback, why aren't they tracked in the JIRA board like a good agile project should be? Why are we having to guess what's influencing the decision. Again Atlassian is meant to be a big promoter of agile, I'm not seeing any of the best practices here. The priority and ordering of the tickets is all black magic right now, no visabiity or defined method of ordering at all. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yet again, I refer you to Brian's blog post.  It answers everything you've asked here, apart from "why can't I be the most important thing they listen to?".  Votes do count, as we've said several times, but they're not everything. 

[tinyCabbage]

They don't, some of those ticket are the highest votes tickets, Not done since 2010. Votes matter really?

A good agile project is meant to remove the confusion as to how features are prioritise, do you feel Atlassian is properly communicating this, do you know exactly why whatever is their current #1 feature is there, over another?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, you've really not understood it.  For the third time, votes matter, but there are other factors. 

The age of an issue is not important, compared with other factors.  We'd not said that before, but it's a good point to bring up - just because something is old doesn't mean it should be done first.  You'd use votes as a more important guide than age.  Or do something that fixes a bug, or moves the product in the desired direction, or gets you revenue - have a look at Bryan's list again, it's got a host of factors far more important than age.

And this is not an Agile project.  It's a product bug/improvement/request project, and as Bryan said, they are working in an Agile way, but that project is only one part of the requirements planning.  It's an import part of the development of the products, but it's only one facet. 

[tinyCabbage]

OK, then order by votes. Open since 2004. In a good agile project, all items are tracked, why aren't all those "other factors" not tracked? Agile is about being able to adapted to the customer needs, if vote aren't the most important - then why not? 

https://jira.atlassian.com/issues?jql=status = Open ORDER BY votes desc

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yet again, Bryan's post answers that.  And, to repeat what I said last time, this is not an Agile project. 

[Johannes Kilian]

@Peter Lai - I'm also frustrated for a long period about Atlassian simply ignoring even highest voted feature requests .... (or delaying them over and over again)

See: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/10418267

[tinyCabbage]

@tim, if there's a better place for this, please advise. 

[tinyCabbage]

Same, like here https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BSERV-3541, i try and post my solutions where i can. 

Often when you raise support tickets, the answers are mostly useless, it feels like even the support engineers don't know how to use their api's or they just say you need to pay for an expect + it's shockingly badly documented - i don't even there's a java doc for their latest api, none that i could find anyway. 

I feel we're getting such a raw deal atm. My last 3 roles, I've rolled out the Atlassian suite as part of change towards agile/devops env, but after years of being let down I don't feel i'll can recommend Atlassian anymore. Once i move on, i have to leave them to the mercy of Atlassian support, i don't think i can do that. 

[Josh Wheeler]

I've stopped hoping for support and features from Atlassian. In my experience, if you want something, you have to try and interpret incomplete/confusing documentation and build it on your own. I do my best to contribute to what takes me hours and days to figure out so others don't have the same experience I've had.

[Tim Crall]

This is a peer support forum for Atlassian users to answer each others' questions.  It's not particularly helpful to post general complaints about Atlassian here, as the community can't really do anything to help with that.