Why does the JIRA experience attempt to force us into a certain workflow?

Alex Dillon February 12, 2018

The new JIRA experience has proven to be disruptive in the way we do business. It now tries to simplify boards by assuming that all issue types should have the same workflow but that is not tied to real life. 

We have an internal Marketing project which has several different issue types. Within our team, we have marketing specialists, designers, and developers. Why should a design issue have the same workflow as a content development issue? 

I sense that this new JIRA experience has more to do with Atlassian's attempt to try and capitalize on different scenarios and nothing to do with actually providing a better experience for their users. In doing this, JIRA will lose its strongest advantage, its ability to fit within any business workflow!

Atlassian, do not tempt me to look elsewhere for an application that will allow me to stay in control of my business!

21 answers

0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
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April 17, 2018

Yes, you can mix, but they will be using two different accounts and urls to do it.

0 votes
Marcelo Farjalla April 17, 2018

I must be a cloud user and my other co-workers are not.  That would explain why they are creating projects in the old UI and I am in the new one.  Is that even possible to have users in the same organization in mixed environs?

0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 16, 2018

They're all still there, but in my opinion, a lot harder to work with.

I'm afraid those of us who have signed up for Cloud have agreed to be lab-rats for new "experiences", it's in the wording.  But go to admin -> labs and see if there's anything in there you can turn off.

0 votes
Marcelo Farjalla April 16, 2018

It's missing key features - like epics and other issue types.  I had a co-worker create a project and for some reason her account doesn't create beta projects. My version clearly says 'Beta' on it and it is missing core functionality. You can't roll out new features like this and block an entire team's productivity. You guys need to be more considerate of your users. 

0 votes
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 16, 2018

It's not a beta any more, you can't go back.

0 votes
Marcelo Farjalla April 16, 2018

I also need to create a new project not using Beta.  I am sorry but this is a terrible decision to automatically have new projects created in Beta.  It is unusable at the moment.  What is the path to get projects created in the "old" UI please. This is urgent.

0 votes
Nicola Fraser-Liddy March 14, 2018

Agree with Alex entirely.  We are also looking at moving away because the new UI is so bad.  You never got lost in Jira before, now we all get lost and can't go back because of several primary flow issues.  I can't find the board.  The option to disable pop ups doesn't work globally.  The reports for burndown etc don't have a scroll bar (I'm on windows).  It's like a  beta.

0 votes
Jason Wong
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
March 5, 2018

Hi Alex, absolutely! Please go ahead an find a time that suits here - https://calendly.com/jira-software-feedback

0 votes
Markos Stefanou March 2, 2018

Jira 7.7.x brings priority schemes and if I'm not mistaken, these allow you to use different workflows for issues depending on the priority set on the issue.

It's worth taking a look at the documentation.

0 votes
Alex Dillon February 28, 2018

Hi Jason, is there a possibility to have a phone or chat conversation? I want to make sure I'm clear on what I am saying and that you understand me. The board functionality before the new experience permitted me to work with multiple workflows in which I was able to assign a status to custom columns on my board. This was available for both software project types and for business project types. 

 I have been forced to convert my business projects to software projects in order to work with them and even at that, I am not able to allow others to modify my board and therefore I have now developed a dependency on me to start and complete sprints. 

0 votes
Jason Wong
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 25, 2018

Hi Alex, 

Reading back to your original post, perhaps I should have aligned with you firstly on whether you are using Jira Core (Business projects) or Jira Software project types.

Perhaps your comment is about the boards and configuration capabilities available out of the box in Jira Core's Business project types, such as in this example? https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/core/marketing 

I may have been addressing your concern from the perspective of Jira Software's Scrum, Kanban and the new Agility boards capabilities.

  • The ability to flexibly configure multiple issue types with custom workflows across columns on a board can be done with Jira Software's existing scrum and kanban boards.
  • The new Agility boards in Jira Software will have those features over time, so be assured that we won't be moving in a direction where we force people to work in a streamlined way - our goal is to make sure Jira Software continues to support whichever way works best for your team.
  • Only Jira Software projects support the concept of multiple boards per project, which is why you can only specify a location for a Jira Software project, and not a Jira Core project. 

 

You are correct in that these Jira Core projects and board functionality currently only supports a single workflow. https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiracorecloud/working-with-boards-800712866.html

This hasn't changed with the new Jira experience.

Would your request be to open up workflows per issue type for Jira Core board functionality?

0 votes
Alex Dillon February 20, 2018

No, I have not reached out. At the moment we are looking into finding other options other than JIRA. This new update removed our option to work with these boards as a team on our business projects. Once again, you guys have made a horrible choice in forcing us to work with a streamlined workflow that does not fit our business needs. I would be very surprised to hear that I am the only one complaining about this. 

0 votes
Jason Wong
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 18, 2018

Hi Alex, 

Just checking in to see if you were able to contact Support and resolve the problem?

0 votes
Jason Wong
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 15, 2018

You might have already tried this, but if you search for your board, using the left hand search icon, are you not able to see the board pop up in the results, or try clicking through to View all boards? eg.

Screen Shot 2018-02-16 at 3.33.21 PM.png

 

If you need to change the location from business to software then it would be best to contact Support to see if they can reverse the change or location for you.

0 votes
Alex Dillon February 15, 2018

At the moment, I cannot change the location of a board that JIRA decide to place in my profile to a project that is labeled as "business" rather than "software". So that, in fact, is lost functionality. 

Also at the moment, there is no board available for my "business" projects. We run sprints for these projects. So that is also lost functionality. 

Which of the 2 options that you have given do you think will help me resolve my issues faster?

0 votes
Jason Wong
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 15, 2018

Hi Alex,

When you say the old vs new experience, are you referring to the look and feel?

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/introducing-your-new-jira-experience-937886012.html

Moving between the old and new JIRA experience shouldn't affect any functionality - the only things that changed are the new navigation pattern and styling.

The navigation pattern does introduce a new concept of "location" for a board. This requires a board to be paired with a parent project to help people make board-project associations clearer.

Where it doesn't make sense for a board to be paired with a project, they are then put under a user. Perhaps if you are looking for a cross project board, go to your avatar on the bottom left and see if you can find it there.

However, overall you should not forced into any functional changes.

If the matter is urgent, please contact support or as promised above, I'd like to connect directly with you so please book in a time that suits https://calendly.com/jira-software-feedback

0 votes
Alex Dillon February 15, 2018

Jason, as of today I am no longer able to use my old JIRA experience. So based on what you said, I am now being charged to use a basic version of what was available to me before. I am no longer able to work on my different projects as I am used to, I don't have the functionality to modify my board columns for different issue types and workflows. 

PLEASE BRING BACK MY OLD EXPERIENCE! 

0 votes
Alex Dillon February 14, 2018

That sounds like a great idea. Count me in. 

0 votes
Jason Wong
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 14, 2018

Would love to get you to give us feedback once we get those capabilities in.

For something here and now, could I interest you in speaking directly with people developing the new board? It would be a good opportunity to get a deeper understanding of how you’re running your team and how that translates into multiple issue types and workflows.

0 votes
Alex Dillon February 14, 2018

Happy to hear that Jason. I just hope that you do not force your users into this basic workflow approach. Once you have built out the features we have grown to love about JIRA, I'll be happy to try again this new experience.

0 votes
Jason Wong
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 13, 2018

Hi Alex,

I'm the lead product manager for Jira Software and would like to address your concerns so that we can do a better job building out the new experience. 

Our new simplified boards, which are created when you select the Agility project template upon project creation, is in Beta. Is the new boards experience you describe similar to this?

New Agility boards.001.jpeg

We have yet to build in the customisation features, such as issue types and workflow management, that have been popular amongst our customers. In order to make things like setting up board and project settings easy, we've taken the approach of rebuilding the new boards starting with the basic features - such as being able to create a column and a card directly on the board. This approach enables us to make bigger advancements in usability as opposed to making top down tweaks to the older experience. This is why you're seeing just the basics at this stage of our development program, but you'll be glad to hear that there is more coming.

At the moment the new Agility boards make things simpler for people to get started, with a single, open workflow with a single issue type. We have plans to add in the ability to specify multiple issue types to reflect the different kinds of work in your project, and over time we will also enable you to specify specific workflows per issue type.

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