Please develop a visual blocking/blocked by overlay tool for Jira

[scott_lake]

I am a relatively new user to Jira.  I come from decades of traditional project development and software tools.  One thing that is terribly frustrating to me is that there are no visual tools for Jira which allow quick network views of issues, and visual establishment of blocking/blocked by for issues.

This makes it quite difficult to use as a communication tool with leaders that are used to seeing critical path analysis and project managers that are also used to that ease of use.

I have to believe there would be a blossoming new market potential for Atlassian if this type of an overlay was developed.  Both for planning and for communication purposes.

The current method of establishing blocking by memorizing task IDs or writing them down and typing them in, is rather, well, antiquated and wasteful.  Even before the advent of easy access to computing, path and particularly critical path dependencies were drawn on network diagrams with pencil/pens and paper.  Critical path very easy to view.

Perhaps there is a way to drive Jira this way already?  If so, I have not found it.

[Daniel Ebers]

Hi Scott,

although I am not able to give any advise right now just one idea that came to my mind - have you already tried to check Marketplace if there is any App that suits that need?

I fully understand and accept when you say it should be in the product itself. The ecosystem of Apps on the other hand offer plenty of opportunities which might fulfill the request.

The dicussion itself is not very new to me - I sometimes talk to users that find an useful App but expect the functionality provided by it built into the core product.
While it is crucial to give good feedback most times we find them to be happy with an App for a requirement they have some months later.

Regards,
Daniel

[scott_lake]

Daniel,

Thank you for your thoughtful reply.  I fully understand the purpose of exterior apps and plugins.  I'm a Trello user from VERY long ago, recent user of Slack, former HighRise user, and when I have control core environment, I have made use of plugins and apps quite freely.

However, the environment in which I use Atlassian ALM is enterprise/server based, and I have almost no ability to control and/or affect the enterprise environment.  Also, the community that manages the enterprise environment is not very familiar with traditional project management - but rather highly agile development focused. 

I am in a product development environment that is highly hardware focused, and as such has much more traditional project management 'genes' than an agile environment.  But I'm requested to use agile tools to attempt to execute a traditional, phased, and deadline approach to the overall project/program.  Having to manually create blocking, is blocked by, relationships based on memorization of issue numbers, is an extremely clumsy and backwards approach to establishing dependencies.  It's my suspicion that users that have never experienced a visual means for establishing dependencies don't really appreciate the antiquity and hassle of manually coding dependencies, but once they experience a more natural and cadenced dependency establishment, users would never want to go back to manually coding dependencies.

I do believe that incorporating a more natural, skeuomorphic, graphical and visually informative means of establishing dependencies (or blocking in Atlassian terminology), would benefit ALL Jira users to show traditional project management concepts of critical paths, missed blocking that needs to be established, etc.

As it stands, today's Jira feels analogous to programming language environments before 'Visual' and object oriented programming came to be commonplace.

Incorporating a more visual environment for Jira in general would take the product to a much broader user base, in my opinion.