Issue Participants for Jira

See how each team member contributes to great work

Inspiration

The idea for the app was born from our daily work. Very often not only people from the support team are involved in support requests, but also people from other teams: developers, testers, product owners, testers. We often exchange internal comments, but sometimes we need to discuss the problem. Before the coronavirus pandemic, when we worked in the office, we all met at one desk (most of us sat in one room) and discussed. Now, when we work remotely, we organize conversations on Slack or meetings on Zoom. Every time we have to wonder "Who should participate in the conversation?". We lacked an overview of the people involved in the issue. In addition, we noticed that it would be a lot easier to set up a channel on Slack or to organize a meeting on Zoom with one click, where all issue participants would be invited.

What it does

This app displays all users involved in the issue. These are people who performed an action related to it, for example, created an issue, added a comment, logged in working time, etc. All this information is easily available in the Issue Glance.

This app works also in Next-Gen Jira projects.

How we built it

We used Forge UI components which helped us create the front end of our app:

IssueGlance
Table
Text Link

We also used Forge Fetch API which is a partial implementation of node-fetch.

We manage the entire project using Jira Cloud and Confluence. We have prepared the interface graphic designs in Figma.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest pain caused us a lack of support for the Click On event by the AvatarStack component which represents multiple avatars (name and profile picture) for users. For this reason, we have not achieved the effect that was important to us: showing details of the changes made to the issue by the selected user.

In the current version, integrations with Slack and Zoom is not yet done because they need more investigations from our side.

These limitations we reported to the Atlassian team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our beginnings with Forge were very difficult. That is why we consider it successful that the application works. What's more: it works correctly.

The strength of our solution is the lack of configuration. The application is installed and is immediately ready for use. On the other hand, we are aware that this can be a problem for large instances. Therefore, in the future, we would like to add a module with a configuration for the administrator.

We think that the design of the panel (glance) and the mechanics of the application's operation do not differ from the Jira standards. We believe that it is important that the end-user does not feel that he is using an external application. Our application fits perfectly into the product offered by Atlassian.

What we learned

This was our first contact with Forge, so everything was new to us. We learned how Forge works, what is currently possible to achieve, what not yet. In case of this app, the biggest limitation was using only their components to build the interface. We cannot use HTML tags and design UI with CSS. Worth noticing that having React background was really helpful to create the app quickly.

None of us has ever participated in any hackathon! We work with each other every day, but it is a completely different style of work than during such a competition. We were still thinking about how little time we have left, and how much is still to be done. But we can say it was worth it and it certainly is not our last time. We still want to work together :)

What's next for Issue Participants for Jira

The most important functionalities we would like to add to the application are:

details of user activity after clicking on his avatar
showing grouped avatars depending on their actions or the day they were performed
integration with Slack: the ability to create a channel with participants in a single click
integration with Zoom: the ability to organize a meeting with participants in a single click
possibility to create an email where participants are automatically added as recipients

A lot depends on how much Forge will offer us and in what direction its possibilities will develop. Currently, Forge is not supported on the Atlassian Marketplace. (We are looking forward to adding such support!) For this reason, we decided to convert the application into a Connect app to be able to share it with other users and publish it on the Marketplace.