Case Study: Overdue Task Notifier for StarLine
About the Customer
Not long time ago we completed a simple but quite useful project for the leading Russian developer and manufacturer of modern anti-theft alarm systems for cars – StarLine. This company specializes in creation of complex and intelligent anti-theft alarm system for vehicles and manufacture of hi-tech equipment, such as CAN-modules, programmers for reading and updating firmware of CAN-protocols. The company works actively with key vehicle manufacturers on the Russian market and supplies the produced cars with highly reliable and secure anti-theft alarm systems.
The manufacturing of all components resides completely in Russia and the company takes pride of this fact. The company pays much attention to high product quality, continuously follows all the appearing innovations and tries to be always one step ahead of its rivals. Innovations are introduced everywhere – in manufacture and technologies and in quality assurance and customer support.
Project Overview
The customer uses our JIRA Call Center for tracking support requests over phone in JIRA. For improving the level of provided customer support service the customer needed a robust solution for notifying users about opened issues which deadline has already passed. Atlassian JIRA is equipped with the powerful engine for sending notifications when you can configure the notifications scheme for different events that occur in JIRA. Notifications will be sent to the appropriate user groups, project roles or specific users. But email notifications are not always a solution as many people can skip them or set automatic redirection to spam. Considering the generic notifications about new comment or issue status change it was not a great issue, but what about the overdue tasks, when some customer waiting for support did not receive the response for a period of time exceeding the one outlined in SLA.
After discussion of key requirements and use cases, it was agreed to develop the persisting notifications about support requests tracked in JIRA shown to agents right in JIRA interface. The add-on functionality included two types of notifications:
- interface notifications displaying the list of overdue issues assigned to the current user
- email notifications sent to the specific project role (usually, the project coordinators)
Notifications in JIRA interface were intended to discipline users and notify them about overdue tasks or tasks without deadline. Email notifications were a means to help project coordinators to keep track of overdue tasks and contact assignees for clarifying the status of tasks.
Configuration and Installation
Configuration of the add-on is performed through the XML file that you need to put within the JIRA installation folder. For operation of the add-on you need to specify the projects that the add-on is enabled for, set the frequency of showing notifications and specify custom fields included into the emails sent as notifications to project coordinators.
Optionally, you can define the user groups which the add-on is enabled for and set the time interval for checking the overdue issues.
Installation of the add-on is performed in a normal way by uploading the add-on in the Manage Add-ons section.
Interface Notifications
The add-on displays the notification area which you can expand to view the full list of overdue tasks assigned to you.
You can easily expand this notification area and browse the list of overdue tasks assigned to you. All the overdue tasks are updated in the real-time mode in the notification area, and they area instantly removed as soon as the assignee resolves them.
So each user will be always aware of all overdue tasks as the notification area cannot be closed.
Email Notifications
Email notifications are sent to the specific project role specified in the add-on configuration. The notification includes some native JIRA fields and additional custom fields that you specify in the configuration file.Such notifications are important to project coordinators for identifying the reasons why support agents cannot resolve the specific issue and assist them with this.
If some custom field is missing in the project configuration so such a field is not included into the email notification.
Results
The add-on has simplified the overall user experience with tasks having deadlines. Now users and project coordinators get continuous updates on all overdue tasks that they actually have in projects. This solution allowed the customer to increase the overall response speed and boost the overall performance of the team.
