An update on team-managed projects customer feedback – November 2021
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29 September 2022: Thanks for your interest in helping us shape and improve Jira Software. There's a new Update on Jira Software customer feedback – September 2022 now available, so this older article may no longer be actively monitored. |
Hi! My name is Eoin and I'm a product manager working on Team-managed projects in Jira Software Cloud. We're continuously improving and updating Jira Software and feedback from our customers is an essential part of that process. With that in mind, this update will address the top themes from the feedback we've received over the past few months relating to Board, Backlog, and Reports views, plus a preview of some of the exciting stuff we’re working on.
And a quick reminder that since the last update, we have seen the delivery of customized workflows, estimation in hours, and the ability to reopen and edit completed sprints.
Speed and Efficiency
Speed and efficiency when using the Board, Backlog, and Reports views remain a strong theme in feedback. You've told us that you lose productivity on critical work while waiting for pages to load or lagging functionality to respond and that tasks requiring too many clicks (each with its own cumulative performance penalty) can also decrease their efficiency.
Performance for Jira’s team-managed projects just got snappier! shares a great summary of the work done around performance since last year. And whilst we will take the time to share these wins, we understand much more is needed to meet the expectations of many of you. That’s why we're committing to a high level of continued investment in performance and efficiency over the coming quarters.
We also want to acknowledge that virtualization, which has contributed to the improved performance improvements, has caused frustration with some users. Virtualization works by auto-rendering only the issues that fit your screen (plus a buffer of 10 issues outside the screen), and de-render them when they are scrolled to the outside of the screen.
This means that when users use the cmd/ctrl-f browser shortcut, they are only able to find content within those rendered issues (since CTRL-f works by only searching for rendered issues) and not across the content of the entire page.
To work around this, we take the user to the search box at the top of the backlog/board view, which will allow the user to search across all issues as that search is based on searching issues in the browser’s memory (rather than searching rendered issues).
We understand this is a disruption and we are considering longer-term alternatives, but for now, we have optimized for a performance win for the majority of users.
Limited features
Workflows
You’ve told us that you want more control of how work progresses to match how your teams work, so we’ve been bringing a new way to define, adapt and adjust workflows in your team-managed (next-gen) projects.
Within the last few months, you can customise your workflow for different issue types and processes, as well as map multiple statuses to a single column to keep your board tidy.
We’re currently focusing on bringing the ability to hide statuses from the Board view to suit your specific planning, tracking, and reporting needs. This should be available in the next couple of months.
And next up will be to help you track the information that’s important to you by making input in certain fields required in order for that piece of work to proceed.
Better filtering
We know people struggle to find their work in particular views within Jira. Many of you have expressed frustration with the limited fields and the inability to easily filter out unnecessary information. Some of you questioned where filters are located and others shared difficulties with setting up additional filters on your projects.
We’ve just begun working on helping teams extend the view filters by creating more advanced filters backed by JQL, which should be available in the next couple of quarters.
Add yourself as a watcher to the suggestion ticket to get the latest updates as the work progresses.
Customize the card layout
It’s already possible to show due date, priority, and estimation on cards when the relevant fields are configured on an issue type, but we also know you want the flexibility to fully customize the card layout in each view, so you can bring just the right level of information to your team's attention at a glance.
Enabling teams to further customize the fields you see on the cards in the Board and Backlog views is something that we want to make available in team-managed projects, although it’s not something that we'll be focusing on in the next nine months. In the meantime, we recommend anyone who really needs to fully customize the card layout use company-managed projects.
Add yourself as a watcher to the suggestion ticket to get the latest updates as the work progresses.
Cross-team tracking
Multiple boards in one project
When you have a number of teams working closely together and want to control your own work processes and practices in a self-contained space – creating a board per team or workstream within the same project can give you the best of both worlds.
Every team will benefit from the same project configuration – issue types, issue type fields, workflows, access, notifications, integrations, and automation; whilst also having the flexibility to set up their own views, estimation technique, and way of working (eg. using sprints or kanban).
We’ve begun working on allowing multiple boards in a project where the scope of the board is limited to issues from this project. We should have this available within the next few quarters, and subsequent to that we will begin working on the ability to expand the scope of a single board to include issues from multiple projects. In the meantime, we recommend anyone who really needs the ability to create multiple boards within a project use classic projects.
Add yourself as a watcher to the suggestion ticket to get the latest updates as the work progresses.
Parallel sprints operating from the same Backlog
Some of you have shared that depending on how you organize your teams, you may want two or more teams working from the same backlog, to work on their own sprints simultaneously. While this may not be textbook Scrum, we understand it can be a more lightweight option for teams than creating multiple boards with quick filters.
We're still committed to delivering parallel sprints. However, this will be delayed while we tackle some of the big themes above first. Add yourself as a watcher to the suggestion ticket to get the latest updates as the work progresses.
Insights
One of the more recent additions to the backlog and board views has been the introduction of insights. With actionable metrics, insights, and recommendations, we want to empower you to build and train muscles to continuously learn and improve your way of working.
In the last few months, we’ve delivered recommendations for sprint commitment targets in the backlog as you plan as well as issue type breakdown and sprint progress insights. You can read more in Introducing insights for Jira Software Cloud.
And next we’ll be surfacing burndown insights for teams to easily understand the likelihood of completing their work in the current sprint and take action to increase it.
There’s plenty of work in progress as we listen and act on the feedback we receive from customers, to ensure we’re continuing to improve Jira Software. We'll continue sharing the work being done on our cloud roadmap and through regular updates like this one in Community.
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Eoin
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Senior Product Manager
Atlassian
Sydney
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