Unveiling the Apps’ Journey: From Past to Present and Beyond

Atlassian team

Rozdoum addon – Past, Present and Future.

Past. The journey

Our journey as what now became Atlassian Marketplace partner started back in November 2011. We started with an app that aimed integration of Atlassian Jira with invoicing and accounting system Freshbooks. The reason was as simple as we had to integrate one system – we used for reporting time – Jira with another we used for sending invoices to clients – Freshbooks. That was a niche offering addressing a very specific setup, at the same time it was a case when we made public a tool that we created for internal use to simplify and speed up one of our business processes. In retrospective that the release of Freshbooks Connector for Jira became a root for two consequences – we kept releasing apps that we used in our internal processes and we became very much keen on integrating different platforms to make business processes seamless.

Since that time we released a number of add-ons:

• Agile Remaining Estimate Counter – that adds simple but useful functionality – it adds proper calculation of remaining estimate to agile board. Assume you have a task estimated as 8h and you spent 2 hours on that. The obvious answer to the question of how much is left is 6 ( if you don’t consider that it’s unknown until done). AREC has a presence on Server/DC and cloud, though the flexibility you have as a developer on the Server platform is much more sophisticated, and that explains the easiness of UI

• Streak connector for Jira – another integration tool of CRM Streak with Jira. This addon aimed to make processes in Sales and Marketing department match their counterpart in delivery & development

• Reopening Counter for Jira – the simple app that adds an indicator – of how many times the issue was resolved. It provides an opportunity to identify problematic issues early in the process.

• Watchtower for Jira The provides one place for efficient task management across different instances of Jira hosted on the Cloud, Server, or Data Center and Trello. Think of companies providing services for several clients or organizations undergoing mergers & acquisitions or divisions of enterprises with federated environments. In all these case one need to deal with the situation where the work is spread across a few instances of Jira. What Watchtower allows is to integrate issues from all different sources into one agile board and work with that

  • Trello Boards inside Jira adds another layer to Watchtower integrating Trello into the picture. In a way – it’s a lightweight Watchtower where you can merge work between one Jira instance and a number of Trello sources.

  • Time Reports for Remote Jira enhances WatchTower addon by allowing you to track time logged in multiple Jira instances.

• Task Manager for Confluence is another sample of integration apps focusing on eliminating context switching. Consider the situation where you need to change/create Jira issues when you work in Confluence. What a hassle is to switch the context, make changes in Jira, or create an issue and then return back to the left confluence page. What a relief it might be if you can work with Jira issues right from the Confluence page and that’s exactly what Task Manager for Confluence provides – the possibility to work with Jira without leaving the context of the Confluence page.

• Requirements Clarity Map – addon for Confluence to gather dynamically changing requirements and addressing uncertainty while pursuing the end goal of delivering a product. The critical thing in delivering a product is to accept that when starting you may only make assumptions about what your end goal would be. On the path, you will need to identify risks, resolve technical challenges, and investigate different alternatives for solving the same problem. On this path, the common factors might be – size, clarity ( how certain you are in what you need to do), and relation to other parts. Requirement Clarity Map addresses exactly that – it gives you a visual graph of things you need to tackle with a clear indication of size and clarity. So stakeholders can easily prioritize what do they want to address next – big and risky ( uncertain) things, where the outcome is unknown or a number of smaller and clear items where you result is more or less guaranteed

• Range Estimate for Jira – another addon resulted from internal practice. When making your backlog grooming how often did you get a range of estimates for a certain task? In our practice like always, based on who is making the estimate or what risks are involved. In this case – why the original estimate is a single value field? We found it quite convenient to have an estimate as a range, so the project manager can clearly see the best and worst-case scenarios. Given two values and time spent – we can clearly report on issues that are within the expected range, about to reach the limit or go way better than anticipated.

• Calendar for Confluence – Well, the name stands for itself – started as a challenge to try out Forge as a development platform and idea that would definitely be practical for all users who are on a Standard subscription. It turned out that the main challenge was not development but distribution – Atlassian restricted the installation of the Forge app in production the way it exists in the development environment. That in turn made the life of users painful to the degree that Calendar for Confluence gained leadership in the number of support requests within the first month of existence and taking that position for now. As we clearly see the need – we finally decided to re-write the addon on Connect and simplify the life of end-user

• Absence Tracking for Jira – Last but not least – one more addon with roots in internal processes. We do keep track of all activities in Jira and make time reports based on that. With that in mind, time of absence such as vacation, sick leaves, and travels got lost in reporting. Absence tracking is the way to address that easily and efficiently – one person raises a request, and the other approves that. The addon will add a pre-configured amount of hours on a daily basis for each day in the requested period.

Present.

That was a brief retrospective of the past. As of now, Rozdoum joined The Adaptavist Group, so we now want to focus only on addons that got some traction from the user audience and retire those that did not. So we will keep on active development on WatchTower and Trello, Task Management. We will provide active support and maintenance for Agile Remaining Estimate Counter, Requirements Clarity Map, Reopening Counter, and Calendar for Confluence. At the same time we tempt to retire Absence Tracking, Range estimate as well as our veterans – Freshbooks and Streak Connectors for Jira. We will respect all terms of existing maintenance

Future.

That’s the most interesting thing, of course. We are currently investigating the possible options and directions for future development of our add-ons or the new ones. Among things we currently consider

• the extension of Watchtower to support integrating data from other platforms. Monday.com – would be the first candidate, but we are open to other sources – so if you have a specific need for data from other sources to be managed inside Jira – please reach out to us.

• Cross Jira JQL queries, so that you can work with data across many sources in a convenient way

• Number of help utilities for Jira Cloud administration, here you can think of Microscope for cloud

Stay tuned

Andriy Dekhtyar