Addressing feedback and bugs quicker than ever before!

[#1]

Hiya, everyone! My name is Jake Comito, and I am one of the new Product Managers on Jira Align. I am stoked to be working on this product, and to get feedback via this community! 

I am dedicating my first Jira Align blog post to a huge bug squashing initiative. Read on to learn about the bug work we've been doing.  

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Background

At Atlassian, we believe that a good idea can come from anywhere, and we encourage our customers and partners to submit feedback, bugs, and suggestions whenever they think of them. We recently grew our R&D team, which has allowed us to make a significant investment in improving our speed, quality, and our overall ability to address your concerns and feedback.

Over the past several months, Jira Align Product and Engineering teams spent tons of time reviewing over 1,000 JAC tickets in an effort to better understand the biggest problem areas, and to respond to feedback more efficiently.

What To Expect

During our review, we started to notice areas of the product that are drawing a high number of tickets. We also differentiated between duplicate tickets, suggestions, and tickets that are blocking key functionality.

Given this, we will be updating ticket statuses, and adding comments when necessary. The ticket statuses, associated definitions, and expectations are listed below:

JAC TICKET STATUS	DEFINITION	EXPECTATION
BUG	An error in the product that is impacting existing functionality.	Bugs are prioritized based on the the estimated impact to Atlassian users. Atlassian begins work on Highest priority bugs as soon as reasonably possible, and generally seeks to begin work on High priority bugs in the next sprint. For more information about Atlassian’s Cloud Bug Fix Policy, click here.
SUGGESTION	An idea to enhance a part of the product.	Suggestions will be addressed as part of product enhancements that we communicate during our quarterly planning.
WON'T FIX	N/A	Won’t Fix tickets will include a thorough explanation on why the ticket is being deprioritized.

With this renewed focus and organization, you will notice the following:

• all existing tickets with a bug status will be addressed within the next few quarters;

• all new tickets with a bug status will be addressed according to Atlassian's Cloud Bug Fix Policy;

• all new and existing tickets with a suggestion status will be considered as part of our product roadmap, which will be communicated during our quarterly roadmap webinar;

• all tickets with a won't fix status will be deprioritized.

To elaborate on tickets with a suggestion status, we will either create new projects that address the underlying issue, or incorporate these tickets into existing projects.

Let’s look at an example of how we are handling tickets with a suggestion status in our current forecast project:

EXAMPLE: After reviewing tons of tickets, we identified 26 tickets relating to forecast. As you know, we are planning to launch forecast enhancements in Q2 2023. As part of this launch, we have included 10 suggestion tickets into this launch, some of which are inherently addressed as part of our enhancements, others of which are making forecast better in general. We will do this with all future feature enhancements.

We are excited about this new chapter of transparency and speed, and we hope you are too! If you think we assigned the wrong status to a bug that is absolutely critical to your business, please contact your TAM, or follow up in the ticket.

[edwin vasquez]

Thanks for sharing this info!

[Carmen Popp]

Thanks for sharing! Could you please also share the information which 10 suggestions we can expect to be included for the forecast feature in Q2 2023?

[Julie Rios]

Hi Jake,

I want to first state that I truly do appreciate the renewed committment and sense of urgency around addressing bugs- especially those that are so old/have been lingering.

However, I'd like to know how to best proceed in the event that a bug we were following:
1) is still valid/persisting
2) was closed as "won't fix" due to age or low impact score?

Should we bother re-opening a new one? Is it possible that new eyes will bump up the impact score?

It simply puts Admins in between a rock and a hard place when there is clearly something functioning incorrectly and we have to tell users "sorry- they're aware of it and just not gonna fix it". :-/