Do you feel frustrated when it comes to regular performance reviews? You need to talk to a lot of people, find out what they think about the person whose performance you are assessing. You need to coordinate multiple one-on-one meetings, gather information, analyze it, and, finally, determine the current situation on the basis of subjective opinions.
The Employee Ratings app concentrates more on the performance of the individual rather than on their personal characteristics. This solution allows other employees to contribute to the career development and promotions of their colleagues.
Give your employees a way to evaluate the work of each so that you can get an unbiased assessment of their performance based on ratings from different people.
When someone closes the issue, the reporter of the task gets a capability to assess the completed work against three metrics:
Work quality. This metric helps you track how well the work was completed to determine its quality.
Speed. This metric captures task performance time illustrating how fast the task reached the end.
Skills / Efficiency. This metric demonstrates how the working process was going on and whether any external help was needed.
Your employees can review their colleagues’ progress regularly, so you can automatically collect data for performance reviews with minimal efforts.
As a result, within each project, you get a single dashboard showing metrics for each person involved in this or that project.
Besides the metrics, you can view the trend for each parameter, so you can better understand whether it improves or worsens. By combining metrics from different projects, you can better understand how your employees perform, what they’re doing well and where they could improve.
Employee Ratings for Jira Cloud can help you make informed decisions regarding employee contribution, training needs, and career development.
Take a more comprehensive approach to employee development and make your performance review run smoothly. Use the metrics to improve the performance of individuals and the team as a whole.
Subscribe for monthly updates on how to get the most out of Atlassian products.
Thank you for signing up
for our newsletter!
You will be the first to know about fresh content, releases,
and special projects.
Stay tuned.
5 New Jira Apps to Work Efficiently – Third Quarter 2019
December 19, 2019
#Jira
10 min
It is easy to get lost when browsing through the Atlassian Marketplace and searching for Jira apps. That is why we prepare a list of new Jira apps for you every quarter. This time our list includes the following solutions:
Epic Roadmap for Jira Software helps your team work in sync. It provides you with a bunch of nifty features that are essential for product managers who use Jira Server and need the roadmap function to visualize and manage their Epics.
This easy-to-understand app allows you to get a better understanding of what your team is working on. You can easily filter the bars by status, move and resize them on the timeline to fit your needs. You can check and define the time range for the display of the timeline items choosing weeks, months, or quarters.
Using this app, you can see the big picture and effectively plan your future tasks.
Pricing: The pricing forEpic Roadmap for Jira Server starts from $50 for 25 users and ends at $1,000 for 10,000+ users.
By default, Jira lets you delete one attachment at a time. But what if you have more than 100 files you need to remove from your Jira issue? You can use the Delete Bulk Attachments for Jira app that will help you to mass delete attachments in a flash.
You can effortlessly remove attachments that are no longer relevant to your work, select multiple files at once and delete them without numerous confirmations.
Moreover, if you are looking for a more powerful solution for document management in Jira, you can try Smart Attachments for Jira. It provides you with a bunch of nifty features that are essential for users who need to manage files in Jira efficiently. It provides you with categorization of attachments in issues, project storage for keeping important documents and assets, a neat set of bulk operations, and a comprehensive revision management system.
Read Receipts for Jira Service Desk is a handy app that allows you to understand if people are getting the messages you send. With the help of this app, you can check if and when your last reply was read by the customer. You can enable this app per project.
You can tag unread tickets and apply other automations with the help of this solution.
This app increases the productivity of your agents and helps your team decrease ticket resolution time.
Pricing: The Read Receipts for Jira Service Desk app pricing for Jira Cloud starts at $3/mo for 20 users and ends at $4,675/mo for 5,000 users.
The Simple notifications for Jira app helps you keep track of all issue changes when you are on any Jira page. The best thing about this app is that each user can enable or disable the display of automatic notifications.
Jira administrators can rapidly send messages with any HTML to users or user groups. Moreover, they can send notifications that will close only after clicking.
Give this app a shot and see in practice how it automates your work in Jira.
CSS Portal Styler for Jira Service Desk is an app that helps administrators to modify the existing customer portals effortlessly. Jira Service Desk provides no marking for mandatory fields. It only shows optional fields.
This app allows you to easily change the customer portals CSS upon load of the request type.
This solution is of great help for agents and customers who use Jira Software because they got used to the mandatory fields are marked by a red asterisk.
These are the most interesting apps released in the third quarter that can make you more productive in the long run. You can also check our selection of Jira apps released between April 1st and June 30th in 2019.
If you have any questions, feel free to comment on this blog post below. Tell us more about your favorite Jira apps.
Subscribe for monthly updates on how to get the most out of Atlassian products.
Thank you for signing up
for our newsletter!
You will be the first to know about fresh content, releases,
and special projects.
Stay tuned.
4 New Jira Apps to Power up Jira Issues – Second Quarter 2019
August 29, 2019
#Jira
7 min
Whether you are a recent convert to Atlassian Jira or a power user, the Atlassian Marketplace list of Jira apps can be intimidating. Our quarterly selection of apps can be a great support for anyone looking to jump-start their collection.
You can try out the brand new apps released in the second quarter of 2019 we liked most:
You can use the Confluence Custom Fields app instead of just linking Confluence pages to Jira issues. With the help of this app you can use Confluence pages as data sources when you create new Jira issues. You just need to create some reference data in Confluence and after that go back to Jira and create and configure custom fields.
After that you can swiftly create new Jira issues and choose the required fields. This app also allows users to filter Confluence pages right in custom fields according to their requirements. Moreover, you can search for issues Confluence custom fields in JQL queries.
Check out this app to create a new custom field type Confluence Page Field.
Timeline for Jira helps you keep your team on the same page and effortlessly plan you tasks. Moreover, it can help you identify and prevent potential delays visualizing the overall progress of your project. This solution also allows you to see how many tasks each team member needs to fulfill. This way team leads can better understand if any of their team members is overloaded with work.
With the help of this app you can quickly create and manage informative timelines and use drag and drop to work with your issues faster. Timeline for Jira helps teams visualize work distribution and allocation.
If you want your team to focus on real company priorities, you can use Issue Score for Jira. This app helps you understand what to build next, boosts you team productivity and keeps things organized. Now you can rate and prioritize features to deliver more value to your customers with each release.
This add-on provides you with an easy to configure custom field to help product managers make better decisions.
You can easily prioritize features based on your key business metrics.
Pricing: The pricing forIssue Score for Jira Server starts from $25 for 25 users and ends at $3,000 for 10,000+ users.
If you’re missing a capability to store project contacts right in Jira, you need to check out the Project Contacts app. This neat solution adds related contacts to Jira issues. Now you can easily import and export your project contacts.
This app helps you view contact information from multiple Jira issues right in project admin settings.
Pricing: The pricing forProject Contacts for Jira Server starts from $160 for 25 users and ends at $3,040 for 10,000+ users.
If you are looking for some new interesting solutions for Jira, you can make your life easier with the above mentioned Jira apps. All you need to do is give a look and pick the one that suits your needs.
Check out our previous blog post and see our selection of Jira apps released in the first quarter of 2019. Share your picks of the most interesting apps for Jira in the comments below.
Subscribe for monthly updates on how to get the most out of Atlassian products.
Thank you for signing up
for our newsletter!
You will be the first to know about fresh content, releases,
and special projects.
Stay tuned.
3 Ways to Bring Requirements and Test Management Into Jira
July 30, 2019
#Jira#Project management#How To
9 min
This is a guest post by Katarzyna Kornaga from Deviniti – an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner Enterprise and a Gold Top Vendor in the Ecosystem, based in Poland. Kasia discovers the mysteries of requirements and test management in order to share the knowledge with the readers interested in the subject.
Being complex and extensive, testing requires well-organized workflow and transparent cooperation between all people involved. Considering that software development counts even more phases and participating team members, companies have quite a big challenge when it comes to project management. Not only is the process complicated and requires constant tracking, but each part is often performed in a separate tool. But not everyone knows that, as cliché as it may sound, it takes the one simple trick to make all the problems go away.
We’re here to share the secret with you. Imagine how much easier your teams’ life would be if the whole product development was performed in one place. Sounds tempting? Let’s start with test management, which itself is often executed in separate tools.
Software testing consists of multiple stages:
analyzing requirements,
writing test cases,
combining them into test plans,
executing tests,
creating reports,
and finally tracking and reporting defects back to the developers.
Why bringing tests into Jira is a good choice?
In the first place, Jira is a project management tool used by the most successful entrepreneurs to coordinate the work of their teams, what leads to releasing high quality software. The intuitive and user-friendly interface of Atlassian suite allows everyone to keep track throughout each part of the development process, including testing.
Second, this software provides its users with a possibility of comfortable planning, clear for all the stakeholders. As it’s a popular tool, there is no problem with implementing it, and usually it doesn’t require additional training for the team members, even for the new ones.
Last but not least, the point often overlooked is that Jira was originally created for bug tracking. As tests aim at preventing and fixing defects, it appears that these two make a perfect match. Not convinced yet? Below, you’ll find some more benefits which Jira as a test management solution can offer.
Benefits of executing tests in Jira
We distinguished 3 ways of executing tests in Jira. The choice depends on your projects’ complexity, number of team members or other individual preferences. It’s worth a while to analyze the specific needs and select the right one, because it will save you lots of time and money later on.
3 ways to bring requirements and test management into Jira
1. Standalone Jira
This solution is the fastest to implement, as it doesn’t involve any additional tools or plugins. The first thing that should be done is setting up dedicated issue types for requirements and test cases, so analysts, developers, testers and the rest of participating team members could be able to observe all the changes and activities in a given project. The good tip is also to define each issue with related Labels and Components, because it’ll make it easier to search and filter them, if necessary.
As requirements and test cases can be linked to each other as well as tasks and subtasks, Jira gives its users a possibility to track basic relations between them, which constitutes its biggest advantage. When using Atlassian software for test management, we have the objects collected together. No more writing down requirements in Excel sheets, test cases and steps in a special tool as well as using Jira only for distributing tasks or assigning roles. Now, one tool can help do it all.
Using Jira for tracking requirements and tests allows interlinking issues easily
2. Jira with Confluence
As we know, Jira is not a dedicated testing tool, so sometimes its features may not be enough. Requirements are a good example of such a situation. As they are an initial part of the process, it’s extremely important that everyone understands them well. Sometimes they require more extensive descriptions, for which Jira issues’ Description field just won’t be enough. That’s where Confluence comes in.
This Atlassian product focuses on optimizing the work with documents, so it can gather and present a lot of information in a transparent way. And it’s well prepared when it comes to requirements management, too! It’s possible to create a special product requirements page in Confluence. Thanks to this option, Jira can still work its magic with presenting relations between the objects in a transparent form. The users can also be provided with a Blueprint template to describe requirements faster and easier.
A product requirements page in Confluence. Source: Atlassian Documentation
3. Jira extended with a testing app
The third and the most functional way of executing tests in Jira is to use a dedicated extension for testing. One of them is Requirements and Test Management for Jira (RTM) which allows to structure not only test cases, like the majority of similar tools but also requirements.
The range of testing apps’ features is wide. Thanks to full integration with the Atlassian suite, we keep all the tracking possibilities from two previous models and bring them to an even higher level. Requirements, test cases, test plans, executions, and defects can be connected to each other and to Epics, user stories, and other Jira issues. If you decide on RTM, all the stakeholders will know what results from what in the process and track the changes at a glance.
There are also built-in reports which present the data in charts and tables – as each testing element is stored in the same tool, the reports can be generated automatically in a few seconds.
RTM’s Traceability Matrix helps make sure that all the objects are covered by related ones
Jira extended with a dedicated tool will surely meet the needs of even the most demanding software development and testing teams. If you’d like to test RTM for Jira yourself, take a free 30-day trial from the Atlassian Marketplace. You can also book a live demo via Calendly to see the app in action, or read more on bringing requirements and test management inside Jira on Deviniti blog:
5 New Jira Apps to Automate Your Work – First Quarter 2019
May 30, 2019
#Jira
10 min
It is always great to find more clever ways to get things done with the help of new Jira apps. Our team takes a careful look at all new apps released every quarter on the Atlassian Marketplace to share the crème de la crème with you .
Here are some of the most interesting Jira apps launched between January 1st and March 31st this year:
Zoom is one of the leading cloud-based video communication platforms for online conferencing, chats, and webinars. Last year Atlassian announced their partnership with Zoom. This will help Atlassian users to unleash their potential having the right set of integrated tools that perfectly work together.
Now a Zoom meeting with your colleagues and partners is just a click away in Jira. They can easily join discussions via desktop, mobile, or conference room from a simple link.
You can create and schedule meetings related to specific issue directly in Jira. This app helps you to save the summary of the meeting adding a corresponding comment when you complete the meeting. If you recorded the meeting, all users can find its transcript and recording in Jira issue.
Having a video meeting with your team and customers can help you resolve issues more efficiently and quickly. Try this free app to enjoy the power of team collaboration in Jira.
Epic Time Tracking for Jira is an efficient tool that helps you get a detailed overview of your rolled-up hours at a glance for an epic across multiple issues.
Jira issues get an additional panel that allows you to track time estimated, time remaining, and time logged to the epic. You can view the issues and their estimates clicking any of these tabs.
You can also easily access a summary of the child issues on the epic. This table contains all the required information to get a quick overview.
This tool helps you keep an eye on the work logged on your epics getting the total hours logged and initial estimated of all the issues assigned to the epic.
Pricing: The price ofEpic Time Tracking for Jira Server starts from $17 for 25 users and ends at $800 for 10,000+ users.
Action Undo For Jira is a simple tool that can be very helpful for every Jira user. It allows you to cancel any action done to a Jira issue. You can either click the Undo button in the More menu or you just use the Z+Z shortcut combination. This action refreshes the page and the last action in the issue history will be reverted.
Moreover, you can undo actions of other users if you have permissions to edit the relevant fields and issues. This app allows you to undo actions several times in a row skipping the undo actions and the action you’ve already cancelled.
Pricing: The price of the Action Undo For Jira app for Jira Server starts from $75 for 25 users and ends at $3,000 for 10,000+ users.
Teams of all sizes use checklists to track their tasks and work smarter. Multiple Checklists for Jira is an app that helps you break large tasks into smaller pieces to get them done faster. You can create as many checklists as you need in one Jira issue. This app allows you to use checklist templates you can assign to projects and issue types. Moreover, you can automatically add checklists to newly created issues.
Of course, you can quickly add, rename, delete or reorganize any item in your checklist.
This flexible tool helps you effectively measure progress on your projects providing you with a snapshot of key tasks and milestones per issue.
Pricing: The Multiple Checklists for Jira app pricing for Jira Cloud starts at $8/mo for 20 users and ends at $1,035/mo for 5,000 users. The price of this app for Jira Server starts from $160 for 25 users and ends at $3,040 for 10,000+ users.
Testify for Jira – Simple Test Server is an app that helps you simplify the process of testing of your production environment. It allows you to easily configure your testing Jira instance with environment variables.
You can install this add-on both in production and test environments enabling it once you need it. You activate a bunch of features when you set the environment variable TESTIFY_ACTIVE=true:
The color of the Jira menu bar turns red
The app disables mail function
You can also set other environment variable to facilitate you tests:
Use TESTIFY_LICENSE=<license> to overwrite the Jira application license
Use TESTIFY_BASEURL=<url> to change the base URL to match the new staging instance
This app saves your time and effort helping you easily distinguish staging from production.
5 New Jira Apps to Simplify Processes – Fourth Quarter 2018
January 24, 2019
#How To#Jira
12 min
A lot of Jira apps are released in the span of every quarter. We’ve been digging through the Atlassian Marketplace to find the best ones released between October 1 and December 31. So we’ve prepared a new batch of fresh app recommendations, each of which helps you increase your productivity and free up your time.
Enjoy our list of the most useful Jira apps of the fourth quarter, including:
You can also check out our previous selections of the most interesting Jira apps in the first, the second and the third quarters of 2018.
Power Admin
Managing your work effectively as an admin is not an easy task. Especially when you feel overwhelmed with your current tool configuration, or if you only start your Atlassian experience. In these cases making smart decisions with lots of custom fields, workflows and screens can be challenging.
Power Admin is a must-have app for Jira administrators because it helps teams of all sizes easily optimize and manage complex Jira configurations. Now you can search the required configuration element by its ID or name to make sure it is configured properly.
You will get the full information about the usage of the element you’ve chosen. You can learn more about its usage in Projects and Issues and easily navigate to them. This solution also helps you to quickly locate elements that your team uses rarely.
Moreover, this add-on allows you to understand dependencies between various configuration elements in Jira and analyze their usage and change impact.
Pricing: The Power Admin app (Server and Data Center) is free to use.
Field Templates for Jira
Most likely many of you faced a problem when you need to create an issue by template stored, for example, on a Confluence page, or your team has well-defined working process and strict instructions and every comment must follow the precise standards. Or perhaps you just want to help users provide necessary information in created issues.
Field Templates for Jira is a simple and useful app that allows you to save your time on routine operations. This plugin has 2 modules: Field Templates (Issue Fields tab) and Comment Templates (Comment tab).
The Field Templates section lets project administrators create templates for issue text fields. This distinctive feature helps you create predefined values not only for custom text fields but also for system fields like Description or Summary. This way you can balance the lack of native Jira feature to set default values for system fields.
The Comment Templates (Comment tab) section allows to predefine templates for comments in a project. This is an ideal solution to help you standardize your team’s answers, minimize time needed to write a typical comment or simply get rid of uninformative answers like “Done”.
As bonus you can set up template visibility based on:
Issue type
User project role
So making some templates visible only in Bugs by QA team while others can see their own, is not a problem at all. It can be a great flexibility option in a multi team project.
Pricing: The price of Field Templates for Jira Server starts from $50 for 25 users and ends at $1,100 for 10,000+ users.
SoftComply Risk Manager Plus
Risk management is one of the most important QA activities in development of safety-critical devices and software. Let’s face it. Even the most carefully planned project can encounter unexpected problems. So it seems a good idea to use risk planning to identify potential problems that could cause trouble for your project
SoftComply Risk Manager Plus is a smart app that allows you to manage, report and track safety-critical product risks identifying potential problems and analyzing how likely they are to occur. This customizable risk management solution for Hazard Analysis supports FME(C)A with or without Detectability parameter.
The intuitive interface of this app allows you to easily filter, edit, remove or add risks. Moreover, you also can import risks from another system instead of entering them manually.
Now you can easily visualize your risks to mitigate them quicker. The table has two columns that describe the mitigation actions. You can take your risk management to the next level with automated links between risks, risk controls and test cases.
Use this handy app to take action to prevent the risks you can avoid and minimize the ones that you can’t.
Pricing: The price of SoftComply Risk Manager Plus for Jira Server starts from $1,500 for 25 users and ends at $45,000 for 10,000+ users.
Anonymized Project View for Jira
Anonymized Project View for Jira is an app that anonymizes user communication between customers and contractors that work in the same Jira project. This solution can be a lifesaver for the teams that work in Germany or have German customers because it conforms to the Fremdarbeitskräfte (FAK) standard for having non-personal direct communication between project teams from different companies.
The best thing is that this app anonymizes names of other company users in all project views on the fly, without database changes. However, the anonymization does not affect system administrators because they can still see original names of all users.
Contractors and customers can enjoy Jira functionality, including FAK-compliant communication.
This app facilitates collaboration between internal and external project teams anonymizing their name and keeping all parties in the loop.
Pricing: The price of Anonymized Project View for Jira Server starts from $650 for 25 users and ends at $13,200 for 10,000+ users.
Global Issue Notifications for Jira
Global Issue Notifications for Jira helps you add your own custom project notifications for Jira Core, Software and Servicedesk based on your own JQL queries. Now you can keep track of your issues by the given JQL rules. You can also configure the redirect location for individual project notifications. You can configure where the JQL rules redirect your users and define the recipients of notification.
You can always quickly check your notifications in Jira and navigate directly to the configured pages in one click.
This add-on allows you to keep track of Jira issues that you are actively interacting with or need to follow up on. You can also get notifications about new, unassigned and expired issues.
If this list of Jira apps wasn’t enough, you can find more on the Atlassian Marketplace. Don’t forget to subscribe for email notifications about new blog posts in this series! You can try any of these apps for free and make your own choice.
If we missed any great new Jira apps, tell us about them in the comments!
Subscribe for monthly updates on how to get the most out of Atlassian products.
Thank you for signing up
for our newsletter!
You will be the first to know about fresh content, releases,
and special projects.
Stay tuned.
Related posts
We use cookies
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept All”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. However, you may visit "Cookie Settings" to provide a controlled consent.
We use necessary cookies to optimize our site. We’d also like to set performance cookies that help us make improvements by measuring how you use the site.
By clicking “Accept all”, you voluntarily agree to the data processing mentioned.
The cookies collect information in a way that does not directly identify anyone. For more information on how these cookies work please see our ‘Cookies policy’.
Necessary cookies are used for activities that are strictly necessary to operate or deliver the service you requested from us and, therefore, do not require you to consent. They enable core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility.
Performance cookies enable improved functionality and personalization and help us measure traffic and analyze your behavior with the goal of improving our service. This means that our services may not work properly if they are disabled.
.
