SkillWorx for Jira

Jira connector for SkillWorx augmented reality platform.

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Inspiration

As a Platinum Marketplace Partner (and proud Forge early adopters) we are more than capable Atlassian developers. We also have Augmented Reality department in our company - that develops in-house AR solutions. Seeing on our eyes - what problems AR Teams are struggling with we have decided it is time to combine our skills and create synergy to solve them. End user AR software was great but it lacked work harmonization, tasks management and transparency in depicting progress from teams on the ground. Based on our experiences it seemed almost obvious that making Jira the single point of truth (and work orchestration center) would be the perfect match. Codegeist 2022 was great excuse for us to pick Forge and start sculpting proof of concept. So it started our journey - to deliver world class AR Solution, helping companies with they road on digital transformation into industry 4.0.

What it does

Our Forge App serves as a coordination point for AR activities performed by Teams on the ground. Jira Operator creates and manages tasks for team members to be executed on physical devices with AR head set assistance.

It means that Supervisor/Mentor creates parent level task (epic) that will represent physical location (ex. "motor pump section", "engine vault" etc.). For each location multiple taks (representing sequence of activities) can be created. Those sequences can represent reviewing, installation or for example new hire onboarding (to make them familiar with layout of physical devices etc.). Logical quant of work is represented by Issue attached to aforementioned Epic and such Issue will store step information inside its sub-tasks. On a sub-task description one can describe activities for Engineers - using Jira markup as well as emojis etc. - such metadata will be transformed to SkillWorx (in a form of a html tags) and eventually displayed on head mounted displays - aiding Engineers with explicit, visual data in AR. Things like markup, task priority etc. - have direct impact on how will AR markers look like. Once task is finished "on the ground" - it could be sent back to Jira which will result in nice, transparent dashboard of progress - presented to Supervisor/Mentor.

To shed some light on AR module itself let us briefly explain what SkillWorx is. Alt text

SkillWorx Assisted Worker applies spatial intelligence to low-powered and head-mounted wearables devices to assist front-line workers with vital up-to-date information on what to do, where, and how to complete work. SkillWorx Assisted Worker is a SaaS offering that primarily addresses guidance and assistance use-case for field operations via tagging of physical space/object and remote mentoring for frontline workers where a hands-free experience is an invaluable approach because of the nature of their tasks and the need for improving the situational awareness of moving machinery, approaching forklifts or other vehicles, steam escape valves, slips, and trip hazards, electrical and chemical hazards etc.

Our SkillWorx for Jira aims to help Supervisors (aka Mentors) plan their activities, send instructions to head mounted devices with one click and have transparent dashboard for tracking teams progress.

How we built it

Solution basically consist of three parts: Forge App serving as tasks orchestration and progress visualization platform, proxy layer - responsible for translating http traffic into low level c++ client programs invocations and last but not least - client software that is deployed directly onto physical AR devices.

Challenges we ran into

Establishing common dictionary for teams originating from two worlds - Atlassian Ecosystem and AR projects was initially challenging. We have also encountered some Forge hiccups in terms of availability - but they were short and insignificant overall.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Fast paced PoC created (including cooperation between company dev department)
  • Instant, positive feedback from both: AR end users (engineering teams) and AR coordinators that plans work streams for engineers
  • Promising results led to receiving green light for continuation of development works - even after hackathon period
  • Creation of new acronym for JIRA - Jawbreaking Immense Reality Augmentation

What we learned

  • Cross domain cooperation is extremely valuable and can result in astonishing synergy
  • AR capabilities combined with Atlassian ecosystem must be further explored
  • Forge is perfect fit for creating PoC of Jira integrations (with 3rd party software) in short period of time

What's next for SkillWorx for Jira

Out of short period of hackathon we have gathered a plethora of ideas what to do next. To name only the few - scheduling repetitive tasks, enhanced review mechanism (including for example image analysis) - producing reports directly in Jira, fair work distribution among team members (optimizations based on capabilities, routes to physical device locations etc.), feedback module (to shorten feedback loop and gather insights directly from end users) and much more. We are looking forward also to full mobile support for Forge Apps as it will enable us to expand our integrated ecosystem to hand held devices, allowing Supervisors to work on the go.

Great things are yet to come! :)

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