Story Linter

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project came from several sources:

I'm a long-time fan and user of Atlassian products.
I'm a software engineer and as such I was curious about the Atlassian Connect framework. I wanted to take it for a test drive.
I had a frustrating experience which could have been a lot smoother with the help of a Jira add-on like Story Linter.

You can read about the experience in this blog post or in the Atlassian Community.

What it does

Currently, Story Linter analyzes your user stories and checks that they are syntactically well formed and that an acceptance criteria is included. But, we are planning to add more rules and config options, soon.

How we built it

It's built with Spring Boot, Kotlin and Atlassian Connect Spring Boot Starter on the backend. On the Frontend we are using Gatsby, Atlassian JavaScript API and Atlaskit Components.

The build and deployment are completely automated and it's currently deployed in Heroku.

The whole project is in this repo.

Challenges we ran into

We are new to Jira Cloud app development. It took us a bit of time to smoothly navigate the documentation and understand the Atlassian Connect Framework but we have a working app (a good one we hope!).

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that even in its early stage the project has received great feedback from strangers and friends (fellow developers, project managers, scrum masters, etc.) Check out the following posts:

I'm proud that my friend Carlos who is a great software engineer decided to be a part of this project. Since joining, he has brought so much to the table on our conversations about the value that this product brings to its users, how to build it, etc. etc. I'm excited and happy that we're building this together!

What we learned

We learned that we are not alone. We learned that there's an audience for this tool.

Thanks to Carlos, I've learned a bit about NLP and this very interesting conceptual framework to measure user story quality

What's next for Story Linter

We envision Story Linter in the future as a more generic tool with of plenty of configurable, powerful and smart rules. Realtime syntax highlighting, autocompletion and a beautiful map of stories based on roles and intents, and many other cool features.

We want this project to evolve into a framework that would help developers, managers, scrum masters and others, write better issues.

We know that there's a long way to go to fulfill our vision but every journey starts with a first step.