
Atlassian debuts new Jira Software Cloud with timeline view, configuration flow - rbanffy
https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/18/atlassian-debuts-new-jira-software-cloud-with-a-timeline-view-configuration-flow-and-new-apis/
======
dbingham
Well, that's fun. The linked blog post doesn't seem to exist. I can find no
mention of this new release on Jira's blog anywhere. Plus, there's no release
date for these features (which seem like desperately needed improvements)
anywhere. Matches my experience with Jira so far.

Our PM team recently requested we move from Waffle to Jira, since Waffle has
no backlog management and Github's is lacking from a PM point of view. As a
developer, this is a giant leap backwards.

Jira is a terrible mess of throw spaghetti at the wall and hope it works out.
A jumble of all the features you could possibly want, half-assed and thrown
together with terrible UX. The data model is non-sensical (everything is
shared between projects - if you create a status, a field, an issue type, it
becomes the one true object shared by everyone), making the damned thing
impossible to configure.

The way kanban boards currently work is that they don't scroll. They adjust
their horizontal scaling to shove all the columns on to the screen. Dragging
cards between them frequently fails, because when you are dragging, you can
end up scrolling and that will knock Jira's awareness of the card's position
out of whack. When you drag the card, it greys out the board and highlights
the columns you can drop it in in green - which is how I know that Jira's
position tracking gets out of whack. After I've dragged to cause an accidental
scroll, the column I'm hovering over will fail to highlight, but the one two
columns over will highlight.

The whole thing needs to refresh every time you make a change. Or when someone
else makes a change, instead of just showing the change you get a little box
saying "please refresh me". To see your PRs attached to a card, you have to
click into the card, then click into the PR list. It doesn't list which repo
each PR belongs to anywhere, so you have to put that in the title yourself if
you want to be able to see it from Jira. You can't see review status or
comment status from Jira, so you have to click straight through to the PR if
you want to see how the conversation has moved.

And yeah, right now, you have to configure your workflow independently of the
columns and then attach the the statuses to the columns. Figuring that out
took a solid day of clicking around in the nightmarish admin sections. Now
that I'm using it and not trying to configure it, it's annoying, it's
definitely slowing me down over waffle, but it's... manageable. But god I miss
waffle.

These changes, if they actually exist look like they would salve some of these
pains... at least a little.

~~~
rbanffy
> Well, that's fun. The linked blog post doesn't seem to exist. I can find no
> mention of this new release on Jira's blog anywhere. Plus, there's no
> release date for these features (which seem like desperately needed
> improvements) anywhere. Matches my experience with Jira so far.

It feels like Venturebeat messed up a news embargo. My bet is that it'll be
announced shortly.

~~~
seanjregan
:)

------
cwe
Roadmap is exactly what I've been wanting in Jira for years, and have either
convinced devs to build for me at internal hackathons, or hacked together
myself, or bastardized in Google sheets. Can't wait to try this!

------
xalfotis
The link is down but you can find the article on the webarchive:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20181018123152/https://venturebe...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181018123152/https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/18/atlassian-
debuts-new-jira-software-cloud-with-a-timeline-view-configuration-flow-and-
new-apis/)

------
bradstewart
Is JIRA almost unusably slow for anyone else? After a bunch of trial and
error, I've landed on a workflow I like with JIRA, but it painfully slow (we
run on their cloud).

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te_chris
I highly recommend clubhouse. It's like Jira, but won't make you break out in
fits of rage. [http://clubhouse.io/](http://clubhouse.io/)

~~~
swozey
They should offer a single user free plan. If I start using these tools for my
own personal projects it's a lot easier for me to bring it up to others
because I've had months/years of experience using it myself.

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thedancollins
We used Jira for a year doing a "semi-Scrum" development framework ... you
know the one where you throw Agile terms around like you have any idea what
they mean ... it went well enough but I and my lead engineer wound up going to
Scrum Master training. We left Jira and went to Axosoft. Each had pros and
cons of course. Pro-tip: the best software in the world will not help if your
business users do not understand anything but waterfall methodology.

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umut
A simplified configuration flow sounds too dangerous to me. IMHO, making it
easier to "configure" is not necessarily a good thing, and in this particular
context, is THE source of a ton of software development bad practices, low SNR
and micromanagement.. </rant>

~~~
seanjregan
That's why we needed to break down the permissions model to enable more local
control at the project level while still giving administrators the ability to
set the global guardrails. Jira historically has been a more globally focused
permission model.

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chmod775
I have to use their jira cloud offering because of my workplace. I'd already
be happy if it didn't need 5 seconds to load even essentially empty pages.
It's painful.

~~~
rmag
Jira PM here. Sorry to hear about your experience.

We're constantly working hard to make performance improvements on different
fronts.

The new 'next-gen' projects are more performant due to a tech stack update -
the interactions and are snappier and updates are near realtime. Come check it
out by creating a new 'next-gen' project in your Jira Cloud instance.

Outside of 'next-gen' projects, we're currently working on general performance
improvements that will benefit all users.

We're currently making transitions between different parts of the product a
lot faster through data pre-load and pre-render techniques. We're also working
on optimising the front-end and back-end calls for faster loadtimes in
general. We're looking at investing in more datacenters to keep lag times down
for you.

Please keep a lookout on performance improvements. It might be hard to notice
this day to day, but we have been and are always investing on this.

With age we've incurred some technical debt but rest assured we are
unwrangling the complexity everyday so we could optimise our software for you.

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j45
I'm using Aha (it's pretty good, I'm only a paid user) in place of missing
JIRA roadmap functionality.

Aha is worth looking at on its own, or it integrates with Jira quite deeply
yonavoidbsome of these messes.

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gaahrdner
I wonder which (and when), if any, of these improvements will trickle into
their on-premise offerings, given Cloud and Server have diverged quite a bit.

~~~
rmag
Jira PM here. We’re thrilled to hear you’re digging the new improvements on
Jira Cloud.

We can’t promise when (or if) specific features will be deployed in Jira
Server, but the Jira Server team is investigating and learning from customer
feedback on Cloud.

We’ll be balancing the well-received parts of the Cloud experience with
priorities around performance at scale and advanced configuration options in
Jira Server.

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rabidonrails
Looks like VentureBeat launched this before Atlassian got a chance to...link
is now dead.

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smartbit
still no markdown support :-(

