Good to hear you guys are on the case, James. I wasn't trying to bash JIRA itself, just the (relatively small) part of it that is 'public facing' so to say.
There are lots of projects out there that don't have too much control. For example, I'm just looking for a quick way to get somebody else to host issue tracking for me. It's a small project, and there really isn't time to roll my own frontend. I am also relying on sun/project kenai to keep that API accessible, and for them to host the php, rails, or servlet app. If I host it someplace else, latencies go up and I have 2 points of failure, etcetera. I appreciate APIs. They're great. If anyone at project kenai is reading this: I'd _strongly_ urge you to create something in the vein of googlecode's issue tracker as a front-end. That'd be excellent, because professional use of googlecode has some issues (especially around scheduling, it's a bit too simplistic)! However, to make JIRA a nice proposal for either big project hosting shops, or for people who don't want to spend time customizing their install, offering a plugin with a nice front-end aimed at the casual user might not be a bad idea :) On Jul 19, 7:12 am, James Dumay <[email protected]> wrote: > Someone at Atlassian is reading this! :-) > > On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 12:38 AM, Reinier Zwitserloot<[email protected]> > wrote: > > > If they WERE using jira, I can imagine that users, being flabbergasted > > about how to use jira, just mailed them. I honestly believe that a > > good, solid bug tracker that is designed with a clueless end-user in > > mind is a big improvement over any email solution, and will be used > > properly. > > We hear you - we are trying our best to take a hard look at our user > interface in the JIRA 4.0 release (and beyond) to make it a bit > clearer to the less proficient Jira users but not dumb it down so that > its useless for power users. > > I just snapped this screenshot of the project page from our internal > instance that runs the JIRA 4.0 beta (you can try it out by > downloading it from our website for free). > > http://beta.unstated.net/~james/images/jira4-20090719-145308.png > > Compared to the old way...https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WICKET > > Its not ideal but I think the usability is getting there. > > > > > Simple things you can do: > > > 1. Offer a central place for adding more feedback. This is hard with > > email-centric solutions. (Note that the tracker should ask for an > > email address (but not verify it), so a bug investigator can contact > > this person, but all this ought to be done via the tracker, and the > > tracker can fold reply emails into a comment. This still isn't an > > email-centric system, it just offers an alternate interface). > > You could probably build your own simplified interface on top of JIRA > using the SOAP API and something like Grails or Rails in a few hours. > (JIRA 4.0 ships with a bunch of REST endpoints - so that might be more > ideal). > > http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Creating+a+SOAP+Client > > I'm aware of a few customers (including ourselves) who do this :-) > > > 2. Automatically search for some bugs that appear to be similar, list > > them, and point a user at them. Users are somewhat desperate, usually, > > looking for a solution, so odds are they will investigate. With some > > fancy footwork in regards to a header that allows a user to delete the > > report they used made, you may even get some of your investigation > > time back. > > > 3. Be smart about forwarding the new report to more knowledgable users > > - find those similar bugs, and maybe ask 'is this a duplicate of that' > > questions to multiple people, especially if the 'similar bugs' list > > contains bugs from wildly different sections of code. > > 4. Integrate with the tool, so that the tool can add version and other > > relevant information. See netbeans for how awesome this can get. > > I really dig those last three points - we had a similar sort of setup > for a internally built tracker at my previous company and it was > really useful. > > We had thread dumps/stacktraces being emailed back to us from install > sites and they would be matched to existing issues so we could > concentrate on fixing the most high priority issues. > > > Does such a system exist? Evidently not. Maybe someone at atlassian > > reads this :P > > We are listening :-) I'll post an internal blog about this thread when > I get back to the office to give the JIRA dudes some more feedback. > > Cheers, > > James > Build and Release dude @ Atlassian --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
