Vastly Disappointed in Jira Next-Gen

John Eaton November 18, 2020

I'm a big fan of Jira and have been using it for many years. I love the flexibility of the application and have setup many collaborative processes, from employee prospecting and onboarding to multi-tiered development projects across squads/tribes using various agile frameworks and pretty much all Atlassian install products.

Most recently I started at a new company which was using Jira Classic (cloud) with a couple of teams - soon we'll be spinning up more teams. I thought it might be advantageous to migrate the projects to Jira Next-Gen (the simplicity was appealing) and spent last week doing so with the newest team's project (4 sprints worth of tickets). It took time as I wanted all the Done stores and Epics in the one project. It was a somewhat onerous task - the epics lost links to associated stories along with the loss of Components, also you lose story points when migrating to story point estimates - so I basically had to replicate the components using Labels, then transition the stories an epic at a time, then re-associating each "no epic" story to a new Epic in the Next-Project. I did this by first migrating everything that was done in past sprints, then the current backlog, and finally the stories in the current sprint. It was tedious work but I was able to do so without impacting the team's velocity.

Now that I'm in the new project, I'm realizing that there's just too much missing (available in the classic version) to effectively use the Next-Gen project - the main problem is the ability to coordinate multiple squads in the same tribe pulling from a common backlog. I had planned to add people then split into two squads but there's no effective way to do so using the new boards (would need to be able to start multiple sprints from the same backlog, a feature that's missing). I also find the lack of workflow automation rather depressing. I need a rule that assigns a story back to the developer when it doesn't pass code review. The current rules only work progressing the tickets and not regressing. There are other gaps that make things much harder rather than making things easier (I'm a big fan of simplicity but the current app is perhaps a bit too MVP-ish).

It's rather depressing to know that I'll be spending another week moving all these stories back to the original project. In hindsight I would have copied everything into the new project rather than moving and I'd recommend that method over what I did (and yes when I created the project I worked through some sample tickets to see how things worked. As with anything it's the edge cases that kill you). In any case, I hope this feedback is useful and I hope that at some point there's an iteration of this product that's actually useful.

2 comments

Deleted user November 19, 2020

ciao @John Eaton 

I use Atlassian software since 2004 ... are many years.

I can tell you that cyclically in Atlassian these situations occur, when they innovate deeply product we users are, for a certain period of time, in a condition where we ourselves are part of the experiment in progress.

You will see that in a few months the product owners who are following the "cloud" part of Jira will take into consideration the many requests made by us professionals with a lot of experience, and realize them in a brilliant way as they have always done until now with all other Atlassian products.

For example, have you seen that after six years, finally now in confluence you can manage online comments even when you are in edit mode?

Are you also noticing how the Jira cloud interface is "coming back identical" to the super tested and perfect one we have on Jira server?

You also have to understand that it's not easy to transport an application to the cloud and that's why we all support Atlassian.

I do it every day reporting bugs and proposing improvements. Very often I see that improvements or bug fixes are considered and implemented.

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Eoin
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 15, 2021

Hi @John Eaton - I work as a product manager on next-gen projects. I can only apologise for the negative experience you went through. We obviously don't set out to intentionally inflict this pain on our users and we warmly take your feedback as it helps us no end in improving the product. 

For readers of the discussion - I wanted to first share a support document that describes the migration process between next-gen/classic ,and details the limitations with this currently... https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/migrate-between-next-gen-and-classic-projects/

We also have a comparison table available now during project setup that shows what is available in next-gen versus classic, and we are also going to make more improvements to this experience in the near future. And you can use our public roadmap to know whats coming next https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/whats-new/next-gen#intheworks.

Thanks 

Eoin

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John Eaton February 16, 2021

Thank you for your response. I've moved the two teams from NextGen back to Classic. I'll continue to follow the most recent developments and perhaps will have other opportunities in the new product. Any idea when NextGen will be incorporated into Advanced Roadmaps?

 

-- John

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Eoin
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
February 16, 2021

Thanks @John Eaton We'll be switching focus very soon with next-gen; from an independent team focus to a cross team tracking focus. As part of this we will be investing in making next-gen work seamlessly with advanced roadmaps - as well as many other enhancements (for example parallel sprints, multiple boards in a project, cross project boards). These are all big pieces of work and we'll be sure to communicate with everyone as we start them, as well as when we make them available for you all to use.

Cheers

Eoin

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