Atlassian JIRA add-ons to animate flow of work on Kanban boards. Inspired by retrospective meetings, where the teams wanted to see how the project unfolded.
Motivation
JIRA stores history of status transitions for each work item, so it is possible to determine their status (as well as other parameters, e.g. assignee) at any point in the past.
This created very tempting possibility to visualise history in a dynamic way, as opposed to static diagrams like Cumulative Flow Diagram:
Team retrospective meetings gave me further motivation as analysing history of iteration would become much easier if you could just use slider to navigate timeline of the project.
My goal became providing simple to use tool that would make this possible.
Atlassian Marketplace
The product is available at Atlassian Marketplace. There are 2 versions:
Dedicated website with more detailed descriptions at kanbanalytics.com.
Awards
Retrospective Tools for JIRA (JIRA Cloud add-on) has been selected as
Atlassian Codegeist 2015 Best Cloud Add-on winner
Challenges
- Performance optimisation for JavaScript + jQuery animation of large number of work items.
- Limitations of Atlassian Connect APIs (this might have changed now):
- JIRA Server version of the plugin has playback controls that are affixed to the bottom of the screen. That makes it easier to operate with large number of issues as you see the controls at all times. This is not possible to achieve in Cloud add-on as it’s rendered in an iframe.
- You cannot impersonate any JIRA user when calling JIRA REST API from the server. Because of that, searching for issues has to take place in the client. This is not how I originally imagined it working.
Lessons learned
- This was one of the largest personal projects I worked on. It takes a lot more effort to get it done and release than it initially looks like. It took about 3 months from inception until all the assets and copy for Atlassian Marketplace release were ready.
- Atlassian Connect API