The Next Gen Boards are Close to Unusable.

[Carter Tiernan]

I was naive enough to set up my project using a "next gen" board-- as someone who is fairly new to Jira I simply chose the suggested option. As a gentile introduction to the software it is great, but it is just that. Any attempt to use the next gen boards for any sort of moderate or advanced use case is bound for failure.

• Sort by priority of task: can't do it.
• Set a column as "done" so it doesn't clog up your board: Can't do it, only one "done" column per board-- the right most.
• Have more than 100 tasks: please wait 1-5 seconds for each input to be registered.

Putting aside the confusing business practice of pushing customers to an inferior product for the same price. Lets talk about what happens when you realize that a "next gen" project doesn't fulfill your teams needs... You're out of luck-- no way to convert it to a classic board. The best you can do is move all your tasks to a new "classic" board (which from my experience is a hugely unintuitive and manual mapping process) and hope that everything transfers ok. If not, well you moved not copied, so your out of luck.

Even more, if you use the Jira API you'll have to completely re-write your stage change call (at least), because they are not compatible. 

As far as I am concerned save yourself the pain and use the "classic" boards. "next gen" is a flashy waste of time that will cause you more issues than it solves. This can be clearly illustrated by the number of hits are returned when  searching "Jira Next Gen to Classic" on Google. 

As for people like myself who seemingly are stuck with their "next gen" boards. Atlassian, please implement a way to convert our boards to "classic". We need the functionality that is already implemented and was the default before. We are currently being robbed of value by having been directed to use the "next gen" boards.  

[Carter Tiernan]

UPDATE: I found a way to migrate tasks to a classic board.

I want to preface this by saying my tasks were relatively simple (summary, assignee, description, priority, comments). If you have more complex workflows (eg backlog) or fancy issues I'm not sure how well this will work for you.

STEPS:

1. Create a new "classic" board. 
2. Create the same columns and statuses in the new board. This is slightly different on the classic boards. From the main kanban board screen click the three dots on the upper right of the screen and select "Board Settings". From there click "Columns" to create the columns and assign them the correct statuses.
3. Move the tasks to the new board. This is best done through the bulk options found from "Jira Software" -> "Filters" -> "Search Issues".
   1. Filter by the old project name and a single status.
      A single status at a time is key because you cannot move issues to a new board without placing them all in the same column.
   2. Bulk Change the issues, by  selecting the three dots at the top right and clicking the "Bulk Change..." menu option.
   3. Select all the issues
   4. Select "Move issues"
   5. Map the project to the new project and type to "Task"
   6. Select the status to put the tasks in on the new board. This is why you can only move one status at a time.
   7. Un-check "Send mail for this update" and click "Next" until the process kicks off and finishes.

In my experience, the next-gen boards became very laggy when 300 or more tasks were on it at the same time. I now have 1000+ tasks showing on my classic board ("Done" tasks will  appear again until they age off the new column) with minimal to no lag.

I hope this is helpful for others in the position I was in. Maybe down the line we can switch back to next-gen boards but as far as I am concerned its an open beta you should opt-in to knowing that is does not have the functionality you pay for (classic boards) when buying access to Jira.

[nathan briggs]

i left a comment here about how UTTERLY useless JIRA is now.. but it will be indexed.. and I will end up paying the price.. for what? TELLING YOU?

Forget it...