Hi All,
I work in big organisations, Automotive industry. Recently We've started to use JIRA for our agile projects management. Our projects are constantly improved with smaller or greater change points, frozen from development teams, tested and released to customer or internal use cases.
This background puts high reqs for a good solid and reliable release plan. I stopped using excel for that and give JIRA a try. After few months, I have some observations to share.
How tom make JIRA versions feature awesome (what is still missing)
- Additional columns!(let the users decide)
aka. As a user I want to decide which columns in versions overview are relevant for my projects and configure this myself including adding new columns and selecting data type.
Currently each JIRA version has predefined, limited amount of columns, these are: Name, Status, Progress, Start Date, Release Date, Description. Why not allow users decide which data shall help identify their versions? In my organisation use-case, I see the following columns MUST HAVE, to keep it simple:
System Freeze [date] - all dev teams shall prepare the freeze version till this point
HW version [text] - on which HW shall this version run?
Maturity [drop down] - what is the required maturity for the version? eg. in-house testing, customer testing, mass production etc..
Config version [text] - what is the config customer requests for this version
etc...
There are numerous reasons to add this feature and allow users add their data as needed. However this feature is not yet implemented. What are the reasons against?
- Watchers! (let the users watch)
aka. As a user I want to decide which version I want to watch, similarly to other issues, get updates as the version is changed (name, Release Date, Description etc.)
You have this feature already for number if issue types. If something is interesting for me, I add myself to the list of watchers, this allows me to see how the issue is being progressed. Somehow, JIRA Versions does not have this feature. This shall be rather simple to code, what are the reasons against bringing this feature for versions?
- Sorting! (let computer do the work)
aka. As a user I want to click a sort button and choose how the versions shall be sorted eg. by start date or release date.
In the project we have now circa 50 versions after just 3 months. I want to view the versions according to their release date. Sounds simple? There is just one issue. JIRA versions features does not support the sort operation. How is that? I don't know. What I do know is that every time I create new version I must drag'n'scrol'n'drop it down... I can't imagine it when I have 200 or 1000 versions. I can make mistake! Machine cannot. I believe this really simple feature shall be available and brings simplification and value added to projects!
One more point. Agile says, what's on top has the highest priority. Somehow Jira versions do the opposite - visualisation (using the Structure feature) of versions is done in the opposite way - from down to top. Means If I want version to be visualized in the top of Structure view, I need to put it to the bottom of Jira versions overview.
- ... I forgot :)
but when I remind myself I go back in here and add this descriptions.
Jira versions feature has big potential. It can be definitely awesome! But why is it not yet? I don't know, maybe it waited for this post (I hope so:))
Till then..
All the best!
MK
