After my post “JIRA Is More Annoying Than Having to Eat Three Times A Day” was published yesterday, Jon Silvers from Atlassian (developers of JIRA) stopped by and left a friendly comment.

I’m incredibly impressed that my tongue-in-cheek critique came to his attention so quickly.

Hey Jon,

First, thanks for commenting! I’m glad you took my ranting in good spirits and left a gracious comment. I must not have put my karma into overdraft protection.

“Hm, there are lot of people who want to eat three times per day, even some that would be happy with one meal.”

Ouch! At the risk of sounding insensitive, I’m sure they also find the daily existential requirement of eating — and the neuroendocrinological punishments for not eating — profoundly annoying too. At least breathing is automatic, or we’d get absolutely nothing else done. I certainly can’t argue against the fact that we’re incredibly lucky in our selection and availability of food.

“My other first thought after reading this is whether you’re using filters to find only the issues relevant to you? [...] It’s not consumer software, it was never meant to be.”

Yeah, the customer-facing bit is really the key to our issues. We’re directing end-users to JIRA to submit their own feature requests and bug reports. For many of the reasons that JIRA is great for developers (e.g., specificity), it’s conversely daunting for our average end-user.

It would be great if we could really take a democratic community pulse on various feature requests to help us build each release roadmap. The voting feature does exist, but our experience has shown that only the most enthusiastic users will go through the trouble of logging in, reading all the open requests and voting on each task’s profile. Unfortunately, the demands on most people’s time necessitates community polling features that are more socially “Digg-like”.

As I mentioned in my post earlier, I did get the impression that a non-developer user community wasn’t intended to be directly served by JIRA’s interface; however, I’m sure we’re not alone in sending end-users to JIRA anyway. There isn’t a good alternative, beyond fielding every request personally in real-time, or transcribing requests from piles of e-mail. JIRA at least ensures busy developers won’t unintentionally ignore feedback.

“We are working interface improvements, with the knowledge that (A) lots of people really like JIRA as it is today and don’t want many changes and (B) others like you want to see change.”

We’re in both camps. As techie developers, we liked JIRA enough to buy it. As community-driven software designers, we feel JIRA needs an additional community-focused interface that streamlines the feedback process and allows user democracy to contribute to project decision-making.

I’d like to see distributed feedback from the community helping to elevate the great feature requests and showstopping bugs above the overwhelming majority of trivial or self-indulgent requests. That would save us a lot of time as developers, and it would display that we’re always listening (which encourages more feedback, and the cycle continues).

Here’s one of the features I’d headline if I was going to create a JIRA alternative:

Even when we aren’t expecting users to directly vote on tasks or add themselves as watchers, we need the ability to create a private waiting list per task. That list would allow us to add links to helpdesk tickets, forum posts or attach contact e-mail addresses. Once we’ve finished a given task, that waiting list tells us exactly who to ping. There are ways to currently hack this together using private comments on tasks, but the feature really should require that we’re notifying the waiting list before the task disappears.

“You might also want to discuss your pain points on our forums [...] or if you can stomach (pun intended) another JIRA, you can log issues and feature requests…”

Haha! I’ll do that. It’s certainly more efficient for you guys than implanting tracking devices in rogue bloggers (or, you know, following everyone’s RSS).

It’s great to see that you guys are so on top of feedback.