User Mentions Gadget for Jira

Bring @user mentions as one quick list in your Jira Dashboard

Inspiration

When it comes to getting work done, we use Jira software for planning & executing our sprints. One thing we have literally been asked by several team members is to help them create a filter for tasks where they were mentioned by comment. The current workaround for the team was to search their email for the alerts. To find a solution, we researched the Atlassian user community and discovered a known issue- JRACLOUD-27594. It was a pain point good enough to be addressed for Codegeist, and we decided to create a solution using the Forge Platform. This led to the creation of "User mentions gadget for JIRA"

What it does

With the User Mentions Forge Jira Gadget you will never miss a message from your colleague. The App helps Jira teams to – • find all the comments where you've been mentioned as one quick list in your Jira Dashboard. • search through all your mentions easily.

How we built it

To get started with Codegeist22, we divided the project into 2 phases.

Phase 0 - was all about defining the problem statement, understanding the current capabilities of the Forge Platform and looking at the technical feasibility.

We looked at two primary use cases for user mentions...

Individual mentions - to get a list of all their mentions across different projects & tasks, without the need for digging out of their email to find the tickets in which they have been mentioned in

Team mentions - to define a team and get all the team mentions across different projects & tasks.. a valuable feature for teams working remotely.

We also looked at Forge Product trigger in-depth, as it was a feature we have yet to explore.. We also looked at the storage capabilities to ensure we developed it as a state 4 Forge App (Atlassian hosted data and compute)

For the UX, we debated over the fact that whether it should be an application or a gadget. We decided to go with the gadget design, considering the fact that it is lightweight and will add a lot more value to the dashboard view.

Phase 1 - Based on the discussions post Phase 1, the backlog was reprioritized. We also limited the level of configurability to ensure speed to market. The app was piloted within the internal team for feedback and defect identification. Currently, we have the App submitted for listing on the Atlassian Marketplace and is pending approval.

Challenges we ran into

The initial design was to store the incoming mention comment webhooks directly in the storage .. but we soon realized that we would need to handle the modify/delete use-case as well. Changing to storing only issue ids and comment ids helped us to handle modify & delete use cases

Another issue which we had to work around was filtering Atlassian-type users from the user search API (/rest/api/3/user/search). Since the rest API doesn't provide any filter, we had to build our own method for filtering .

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We became very familiar with the Forge platform, its features, and its current limitations. Since the last Codegeist, we have view26 Labs initiative exclusive for Forge App ideation.

What we learned

Posting on the Forge Community is a good way to get issues resolved. Atlassian team & others are quick to share their experience & resolve the issues faced
We also intend to use a 'Forge first' development approach for our Cloud apps going forward as we build expertise on the Forge platform.

What's next for tbc

We want to work on a couple of features, such as ability to mark @mention tasks as complete by users, user sentiment indication, increasing the mentions storage capacity, improved filters etc after getting feedback post Marketplace listing.