Enhanced Jira board and backlog

[Eoin]

Hi @Raul Pelaez _TecnoFor - Marketplace Partner_ - this just isn't a feasible option as we would end up having to support multiple versions of the product in parallel - creating even more maintenance load and splitting up our fixed resources. It's already enough of a challenge to support the breadth of features as it stands. I do get where you are coming from though - but our aim is to fix the bugs to ensure you have parity with the old board - which is why it's important to let us know where you are encountering issues. To give you some transparency - we have a 7% opt-out rate right now - which means most of the issues we see are not common issues. Importantly we still want to fix all this issues reported though. I hope this helps. Thanks for your feedback!

[Eoin]

Hi @Jean Gordon - thanks for the feedback. We understand there is no one size fits all and this is exactly why Jira is so popular. The flexibility and customisation offered is above any other comparable product. As for the new board and backlog, our aim is to offer parity with the existing UI. Can you let us know what issues you are encountering so we can resolve them? This is important as we will hit a point where we have resolved all the known issues and we will turn the new board and backlog on for all remaining users. If we don't know the issues, we won't be able to resolve them. And we really don't want to negatively impact your work. I sincerely mean that. Thanks

[Eoin]

Hi @Hardik Trivedi - if you are referring to the numbers in the divider line of the Scrum backlog (which sits between containers) - then this will be rolled out in the coming days. Thanks

[Eoin]

Hi @Adam Chapman - this would require us, for example, to truncate the description to one line which just wouldn't work for most people, particularly where there have a large number of columns. However what might help is that a feature we will look to iteratively build out is giving users more control over what is shown on their card - this will be available under view settings. We're starting with the epic label but we will want to add more as we get feedback on how use this level of individual control is.

Also do let us know if you feel there is something specific and avoidable that is causing vastly differing heights in card size. It also could be there that there is a specific problem you are encountering. You can email me at eryan@atlassian.com if you wanted to share a screenshot. Thanks for the feedback.

[Eoin]

Hi @Lee Richards - this sounds terrible. Would it be convenient to chat with us on zoom so we can take a closer look at what might be causing these problems https://calendly.com/eoinryan/30min Let me know if there is no good time and I can try do a time that suits you. You can also email me at eryan@atlassian.com Thanks

[Eoin]

Hi @Richie Schuurman - thanks for the feedback. This won't be added back into our scope as it stands. Our usage numbers show this is very rarely used and we were faced with the prospect of having to make updates to it so that it worked with the new UI. I really apologise for the inconvenience caused here. 

[Eoin]

Hi @Marshall Evans - thanks for the feedback - we're on it! You can follow along on this ticket https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-25790. Might take a couple of weeks to get rolled out. Thanks

[Eoin]

Hi @SG - we obviously don't want to lose you to Azure. Can you let us know what issues you are facing? Happy to chart in person, or by email, or on here. Thanks! 

https://calendly.com/eoinryan/30min 

eryan@atlassian.com 

[Eoin]

Hi @Lydia Kerr - is the issue here that the key is bring truncated or it's just not showing at all? Thanks

[Eoin]

Hi @Mike Morper and @Emanuele_Bedin - thanks for the feedback. We believe this was an issue that was resolved over the past week. Can you check if you are still encountering this issue? And if you are, I'd be keen to chat to you on zoom if possible (https://calendly.com/eoinryan/30min). Let me know. Thanks

[Emanuele_Bedin]

Hi @Eoin, I can confirm sub-tasks are now displayed correctly on our boards.

Thanks!

[SG]

Hi @Eoin thank you for reaching out.  Apologies for the level of frustration, I’m sure many people use Jira with precision for their teams. For our teams, we need some basic tools built into Jira so that we do not have to look for them in the Marketplace, convince our companies to pay extra for them, be the testers, and then be frustrated that they do not integrate well with Jira after all that. We need tools flexible enough to adapt to our best way of working, instead of companies/teams adapting to the tool. We need;

- Epic / Feature / Story / Sub-Task hierarchy

- Integrated Pointing/Sizing tool to support grooming with flexibility for Fibonacci and t-shirt sizing

- Individual / Team capacity sprint planning tool with sprint burndown bar graphs to show sub-task remaining hour reduction by person by sprint 

- Sub-task Estimated Hours and Remaining Hours to roll up to the Story level

- Built in retro app to retain history and document solutions

- Ability to easily retain previous sprints without drilling into reports

I’ve received responses like “We keep these features out of Jira so that you can choose the right one for your teams in the Marketplace, and keep the base cost of Jira down.”  The makeshift effort to support these team processes is costing us way more time and effort than it’s worth. Jira has many robust features and extensive reporting capabilities, but we (and many others based on multiple community chats) just need an adaptive tool that covers that basics of an agile software development effort, whatever that means for the individual companies, and not be told "you are doing scrum wrong" by a few admins in this space.   Our company recently inherited teams using Jira, our core business uses ADO/TFS which has all of this functionality built in.      

[Eoin]

Hi @Lydia Kerr - just a follow up - we're on this. We'll look to wrap the icons rather than truncate when the columns get very narrow. Should be available over the next week or so. Thank you!

[Eoin]

Thanks @SG

You don't need to apologise for the frustration. I do understand and I also have to admit that unfortunately, I don't have all the answers for you. But here is some info that may help with any decision you make...

• Hierarchy - we are formalising the 3-level hierarchy in company-managed projects at the moment to work similar to team-managed projects. This will bring consistency and a true hierarchy. To go beyond 3 levels of hierarchy will require you to be on the Premium plan and use Advanced Roadmaps - where there is currently lots of investment to create awesome program-level planning, tracking, and releasing experiences.
• From an estimation perspective, there's unlikely to be investment here in the short term. My recommendation is to use automation where it makes sense to fill any gaps you have with the product - and our community is a great place to get ideas on doing this (e.g. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/how-to-create-t-shirt-size-field-for-estimation-in-Jira/qaq-p/1976665)
• Individual capacity will get some investment, although potentially not to the level of what you are hoping. I do hope to get the workload by assignee feature supporting subtasks over the coming months though. We are investing more broadly in team insights and you should continue to see our insights offering increase substantially over the coming year. 
• Our recommendation for estimation roll-ups is again to use automation - which will allow you to model exactly how you want rollups to work https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/automation-template-library/sum-up-story-points
• For retros, we are continuing to tightly integrate confluence with Jira. There is a retrospective  template and now also a whiteboard offering within Confluence. And you can easily create Jira issues from with confluence, and view confluence content from within Jira.
• There will be some more investment into sprints and I'm in favour of creating a dedicated place for sprints in the product. But I haven't got the buy-in for this yet so I can't make any promises for this in the short term.

Thanks for taking the time to write up your needs. We will continue to invest heavily in Jira Software - that I can assure you. And I appreciate that might not still give you exactly what you need in the short term, but hopefully we can keep you long enough to see the next evolution of Jira come to life.

Thanks

[Etienne Viljoen]

Please don't force us to use this! It lacks certain features, making the old one better.

[Matteo Pacenti]

@Eoin is it possible to visualize date/time fields with the exact date and time?

[CMikol]

This is so much slower than the current functionality, please fix that before forcing everyone to use it.

[Bob Nesbitt]

Hi there.  We received the notification this morning that the new board interface for JIRA cloud will be forced on for us on october 25.  When it first came out we turned it on and quickly turned it off because it will not support how we do sprint planning.  I entered feedback (repeatedly) on the issues in the feedback link in the product, but have not received a response. 

With that notification this morning, I tried again in a team who planned today and it was again a bad and confusing experience.

I don't want to go into crazy detail here, since i have already submitted the feedback repeatedly; but, could an Atlassian PO reach out so I can show you the key issues.  Thanks.

[Luke Nickerson]

@Eoin -- I am dreading these upcoming UI changes because it obscures some information that is now readily available, makes misclicks way more likely, and does not fit my screen.

For context, the view I use every day is to be on the Backlog page with the left side bar open, the list of issues we’re working on open (in the middle), and the active/selected issue open on the right. The visible area of the page is width 1519px (not an uncommon resolution). In the current interface I can look at the list of issues in the middle and see all information at a glance: epic name, release number, who’s assigned, and priority.  I can select the issues I want to dig deeper into with a simple click, and then look at their details on the right. Things work well now. 🙂

In the so-called “enhanced” view, there are several problems:

1. The backlog list is now wider, so it gets cut off, requiring horizontal scrolling within the page (a very awkward interaction), otherwise the assignee and priority are not visible. 😣
2. The epic and release # now require delicately hovering over the icons, and waiting for tip text before I can tell what they are. Even worse: the tool tips are directly under my mouse icon, so I can barely even read them. 😩
3. When I click on the issue in the backlog list to select it (and open it on the right), it is very easy to accidentally add an epic, edit the title, or change the status. The edit button is at the end of the text, so will appear in a different place for every issue; as a move my mouse down from one issue to the next, it is easy to accidentally click this button that has just appeared. 😣
4. When hovering over each issue, there is a delay, and then a "+" icon is added next to the release "ship" icon, which awkwardly moves the boat.

I can appreciate that some users may need to do batch work on issues, but IMO it would be better to either hide this kind of advanced usage behind a toggle, or move some of this edit functionality into the "..." menu.

[Patrick Nelson]

This was sold as a "performance increase" and "improved design" yet:

1. It's far slower. At least for me.
   • Especially since now there's no way to actually find buried tickets in context (i.e. via the browser search Ctrl/Cmd+F) so I can prioritize them on the kanban board. Such a huge drop in functionality. If I use the search filter, it filters and I can no longer find it once I clear the filter. How do I find/ prioritize the ticket?
   • Related to (or, caused by) this: It is removing/adding tickets to the DOM dynamically as I scroll. This is far slower. At least with the large number of tickets that we have queued up; and it's very large. I understand we should use backlog, but this allows us to more easily prioritize and visualize all upcoming tasks. Huge drop in functionality here as well. Makes it feel much jankier.
2. The design is flatter; following that new fad, causing it to be a little harder to actually parse, visually. It's not better; it's worse.

This is a productivity too; function over form, not the other way around, please.

Edit: I knew I'm not alone on the search issues. Same exact problem that 

• @Sanjay Nayar mentions on page 5 of this ascending comment thread, https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-articles/Enhanced-Jira-board-and-backlog/bc-p/2443090#M1607
• @Kyle Mitchell (hopefully I tagged the correct person....) on page 6 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-articles/Enhanced-Jira-board-and-backlog/bc-p/2457951#M1672 

And I'm sure there are other folks experiencing this too; or who will be very soon.

[Patrick Nelson]

Editing out my frustrated comment, since I cannot delete it.

[Patrick Nelson]

Add to that, this supposed performance boosting approach also results in you not being able to fully scroll the list. If you click the scrollbar and try to scroll to the bottom; it doesn't actually; it appends even more, but now your mouse is already at the bottom and the scrollbar has shifted away from the mouse. If you scroll back to the top, because of his dynamic hackery (removal/appending of tickets depending on scroll position), the mouse is now completely and totally above the scrollbar, yet (off up into the header) yet the scrollbar is not even fully scrolled to the top anymore. It completely separates off.

Also, it's janky; there's flicker. I imagine there's CPU overhead of shifting these elements in/out of the page as well. In fact, I opened task manager and watched the CPU/Memory footprint of each version and here it's demonstrably less performant, not only consuming way more memory but dramatically consuming way more CPU as well when attempting to scroll. In fact, it's a terrible downgrade in overall performance, both in CPU + memory regardless of scrolling.

---

Before: Hovered around 15%-20% max during scroll, 90mb memory

After: 87% CPU core (pictured, it was all over the place but frequently above 100%), well over >140mb memory.

[Patrick Nelson]

@Eoin 

...this just isn't a feasible option as we would end up having to support multiple versions of the product in parallel - creating even more maintenance load and splitting up our fixed resources. It's already enough of a challenge to support the breadth of features as it stands

Sounds like a management problem or an issue with architectural decisions. Now unfortunately due to these necessary tech debt management decisions, there are now going to be new bugs and regressions in functionality that will begin to alienate your existing user base.

Keep in mind, I'm paying for the current product; not necessarily for these new features. If you need to rebuild/rearchitect things behind the scenes in order to continue maintaining it; fine, that makes sense (old tech needs to be phased out). But that means you're that if you're going to be rebuilding it, and especially if you're adding new features, it needs to not be at the detriment of existing functionality, performance and etc.

Otherwise: What's the point? If it's working, why change it?

[Eoin]

Hi @Matteo Pacenti You can follow some instructions here https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/configure-the-look-and-feel-of-jira-applications/#Change-date-and-time-formats Let me know if this doesn't works for you. Thanks

[Eoin]

Hi @Etienne Viljoen thanks for the message. Can you let us know which features are missing? You can also email me at eryan@atlassian.com or you can post on here as well. Thanks