Admins driving Atlassian product improvement

[Mykenna Cepek]

As admins, I feel we have a responsibility to help drive the Atlassian product changes that our teams and organizations need.

The Atlassian products are not perfect (no product is). We will discover bugs and feature gaps, based on the needs of our teams and organization. We naturally address the needs of our team/organization first (e.g. finding a workaround for the bug).

Our next opportunity is participation in making that Atlassian product better.

Atlassian has policies about bug fixes and improvements -- I know, TL;DR.

But let's not lose track of the one key thing that we can do:

• Cast a vote for the change we need.

Non-critical, non-urgent issues are prioritized by Atlassian. Community interest is a key metric for prioritization, and thus your votes matter! As of today, I've voted for 45 different issues that have affected my teams. Half are bugs, half are improvements.

How do you vote? Start by searching the Atlassian issue backlog. Some tips:

• Get good at using JQL to search for issues (features, syntax/sematics)
• Narrow your search to the Atlassian products (projects) of interest
• Sorting might help (e.g. newest-first, or oldest-first)
• Adjust the search results window for quicker scanning of "Summaries"

Click here for an example search, which finds about a dozen potential issues of interest -- not bad, considering there are over 260,000 issues.

Consider bookmarking this link as the starting point for your future issue searches.

If you find a matching issue for the problem encountered by your team, be sure to vote for it! Click "This affects my team" as shown below. I also like to click "Start watching this issue", to get notifications when the issue is updated.

         

If you don't find your bug or desired feature, seriously consider taking the time to report it. That's the only way others will be able to find it and vote for it. Include "steps to reproduce", screenshots, and clarity around the desired behavior.

I hope I've been able to encourage you to be a participant in making Atlassian products even better. The Atlassian Community is another great space for learning -- but you can only cast votes in the issue backlog.

We admins are in a unique position of having both clarity and access. It's up to us to help guide Atlassian to the biggest pain-points, so they can prioritize and address them.

What other ideas and approaches do you have to help Atlassian know how to better serve your teams and organizations?

[Pramodh M]

I've reported 3 bugs till date ✌️

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks, @Mykenna Cepek 

Yes, and...

• Before you write a new suggestion or defect, check for synonym words with your searches.  The issue may have already been logged so you can vote/watch it and focus the value of your community vote.
• When writing (or commenting on) a suggestion, please add the business case to help in the value/effort discussions
• When writing a defect, please list the symptoms, impact, repro steps, expected and actual behavior, and any known work-arounds

Best regards,

Bill