Using Jira in Virtual Reality for Scrum ceremonies

[Christian Prison]

Hi!

We are 5 developers and a product owner working on a social VR application designed for software developer teams in distributed settings.

Driven by the impact of the Covid19 pandemic, we at codecentric want to meet at least once a day for a couple of minutes in a more personal way than Zoom. We strongly believe that social VR applications are a great way and much more personal than video conferences – the best choice in times of social distancing.

Currently, our Daily Scrum meetings are in Zoom, sharing the JIRA Taskboard. If we want to make a VR meeting efficient, we need our JIRA Taskboard in VR so we can update and comment development tasks during the Standup meeting.

Apart from working on the board, we also want to make the Daily Standup as much fun as possible, so we chose the metaphor of a strategic planning table with building blocks representing the JIRA issues. Just like the „Battle of Winterfell“ in Game of Thrones:

We are working on it since begin of last year in our 20% time (1 day per week) and are already as far as having a working APK for Oculus Quest ready. We would love to find people who think this is a good idea and are willing to give us feedback - may it be here in a discussion thread or even as pre-alpha testers.

I am not sure if it is a good idea to start a thread like this here in the Atlassian Community, but it is currently the only way I can see to figure out if what we are building is only relevant to us or if there are more people out there who are interested.

Here's a short demo on YouTube (very early pre-alpha).

Update 25. Jan: now we have real data from our JIRA project!

Update 7. May: now we can write back to JIRA and added a bit of eye-candy

Update 9. June: our JIRA was migrated from Server to Data Center. Thanks to our middleware we could fix our connection in only 4 hours!

Update 7. Dec 2021: population of subtasks and more writing updates are working now

I am looking forward to your replies and ideas!

Cheers,

Christian & Team

[Shelly Anderson]

It sounds awesome though I admit I'm having a hard time visualizing how it works. I'd love to see a video demo

[Christian Prison]

Hey Shelly! Thanks for the feedback - we will work something out and share it! 

[Christian Prison]

Here you are: short demo on youtube 

[Shelly Anderson]

Wow - that is really cool. Will participants be able to see each other's faces and actual expressions in real-time? Or will just the avatars be visible?

[Shelly Anderson]

By the way - I like how the size of the backlog item is relative to its size in Jira. I also like how you can throw the details up into the void for reference

[Christian Prison]

Hey Shelly! Thanks for the feedback. seeing each others (real) faces is something that current technology does not allow (yet). I know companies like facebook are working on it but on the other hand:
Losing mimics when working with avatars is something that mostly people complain about who have never experienced a multiuser application in VR before (have you?). You gain so much by spatial audio and body language that not having mimics is overcompensated. Hearing the direction from where you are addressed and turning your head to someone.  Being able to point to something while talking to people. making typical gestures like shrugging, nodding or shaking your head or waving. And some standard animations for your avatar like blinking with your eyes or moving your lips while speaking are already in place. Believe me - you will love meeting in VR! ;-)

[Jan Murdoch]

Hi Christian, love this idea, we are an innovation team who are using Jira for our stand-ups but would love to have that real board feel, so we can see all the tasks rather than trying to wade through filters to view everything, could we try your tool out? thanks in advance

[Evolve]

I'd be interested in using this with my team! I don't know if you've looked at spatial.io. Been trying that and immersed as well. It would be great to integrate the jira functionality you showed in your video with spatial.io as well!

[Christian Prison]

Hi BFire,

yes, that's our hope - to integrate that into existing Social VR for business solutions. MeetinVR has also shown interest already.

Cheers,

Christian

[Roger Lawrence]

We're a VR Training Platform company and have been toying with this idea since 2018. Currently we simply don't have the resources to focus on this ourselves, but would love to work with you on this. There may even be an opportunity to collaborate.

Please reach out via email, or schedule something at r42.it/meet 

Cheers

Roger

rog42@achievr.io

[Christian Prison]

you have mail :-)

[Corben Madden]

Is this available to try? How can I be a beta tester?

[Christian Prison]

tell me your oculus mail and I can add you to the App Lab Alpha channel. If you want to be a beta tester rather than alpha tester, you might want to wait for a few more months ;-)

[Corben Madden]

corben.madden@gmail.com thanks that would be great! Happy to test it out

[Christian Prison]

sent.

[Corben Madden]

Hey sorry I can't find it, will you please re-send it and let me know how I can search for it? 

[Santtu Parikka]

Hi, You might want to try Glue. We already have Jira and Trello integrations available. :)
www.glue.work also available from Quest store and other platforms.

[Christian Prison]

Hi Santtu! Although I know Glue and I like it, a browser integration is not really what I am targeting here. Did you even watch the demo video on YouTube?

[Christian Prison]

Hi! For those of you still following this thread! I have just tried the integration of JIRA provided in the last update of Arthur. It is far better than every browser-based integration I have seen so far. OK, it is still 2D, but it solves a problem for my team! Kudos to Arthur and keep up pushing it further! <3 <3 <3

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It feels like there's now a hundred and eleventy twelve different ways to use an Oculus Quest to work in virtual environments.  (Caveat - I have the original Quest, the 2 and the horribly expensive third one are not something I'm going to look at until they're cheaper or this one wears out)

My work is mostly typing or talking, and I have found it can work very well.  But...

• Pro:
  • I can see several of the virtual environments working as shared workspaces.  Not just meetings, but I've written code while using one.
  • Complexity management. 
    • I work best when I only have 2-3 things to look at, but I also need to see all the other things outside the current focus area. 
    • This laptop has three desktops open as I type - one for the browser, one for the communication application, and one for the terminal sessions. It will open more desktops if I fire up a game or a coding application. 
    • This works better for me in VR.  On a PC, I'm switching between many desktops or windows.  In VR I can put many windows wherever I want, and the canvas for them is enormous.
  • You can hook it up to a surprisingly useful range of devices.  Meta says it only supports a few things, but it works well with every Bluetooth keyboard I've got, and even a "gesture mouse" I did a Kickstarter with.
• Con:
  • Who wants to wear one of these things for a whole day?  I get itchy well before the battery goes flat.
  • Most of my meetings expect me to be on-camera.  You can't do that when wearing a haedset.  It works very well if everyone is in VR though.
  • There's not an 8 hour battery life (assuming "standard" working day)
  • You need a Bluetooth keyboard if you're going to type stuff.  Controllers are clumsy to have to remove when you want to type.  And the "hand-gesture" functions are (apologies for bad words) shite.  There's tech to get around this (I've got a mouse that's just a lump on my finger and it works far better), but you still need a real keyboard.
  • Why am I using VR to pretend to be in an office when I could be throwing axes at a sociopathic rabbit with demon problems?  (So... many... distractions...)

[M.Ebel]

Hi all,

I am trying to implement VR within our team and in the future allover our company. We are using Jira quite a lot. Can somebody tell me the current status of the Jira implementation? Is there a way to test it out myself? I am really interested in this development and if it works out to be very useful there could be a collaboration coming.
Thank you guys for your great work so far and I am really looking forward to any updates!

[Rael Hodgson]

Would love to try this thanks. Quest email is rael@fitxr.com

[Laura Keresztyen]

🔥 2023 Arthur Update: advanced issue management functionality in VR!!

Gone are the days of taking screenshots or pictures during SCRUM or PI planning meetings, and the annoyance of video conferences with a shared screen where you have no input to the board.

• work in a native Jira board inside of your immersive VR collaboration space
• move and scale separate issue cards 
• edit, and attach anything to the issue card

The best? All edits are synched with the Jira board live!

Read more here:https://www.arthur.digital/blog/introducing-the-new-reality-of-jira-collaboration-revolutionizing-how-companies-work

Our new Jira experience boosts collaboration and productivity for enterprises.