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Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian JIRA – First Quarter 2015

April 8, 2015
#Jira
12 min

Last week I wrote about new add-ons for Atlassian Confluence that are according to our team top 5 from those appeared on the Marketplace since the beginning of this year. Now let’s overview top new add-ons for JIRA that had their first release during January-March 2015 and are waiting for you to try them out.

Top 5 new add-ons for JIRA:

Just like with new add-ons for Confluence, we’ll see what problems these add-ons are designed to solve, how you can benefit from using them and how much you’d need to pay to purchase a commercial license.

1. BigGantt

With BigGantt you can visualize your JIRA projects by creating Gantt Charts for a single project or for issues from different projects selected based on a saved filter. I bet you’ve come across other Gantt Chart solutions such as Gantt-Chart Project for JIRA by Soyatec, Gantt-Chart for JIRA by Frank Polscheit, Gantt Cloud by WISOFT, etc.

Being much more affordable than similar plugins, BigGantt offers all essential features you’d expect from such a tool:

  • Creating and customizing Gantt Charts with WBS and data aggregation
  • Creating and managing issues and sub-tasks from Gantt Chart
  • Inline quick editing
  • Issue dependency manipulation while browsing Gantt Charts
  • Issue progress display
  • Synchronization with JIRA
  • Search tasks
  • Several timeline focus options
  • Filters (including user defined) and timeline filtering
  • Creating a baseline and milestones
  • Viewing critical path
  • Export to Excel

Besides that, there are some unique capabilities for your benefit, e.g.:

  • Moving issues is more powerful. It can be done with buttons or via drag&drop, which works not only in the issue list section, but within Gantt Chart as well
  • Using markers to pinpoint dates on the timeline
  • Hiding columns to have more space for Gantt Chart

For more details on the differences between Big Gantt and two other Gantt Chart add-ons mentioned above, you can go through the comparison worked out by SoftwarePlant.

Pricing: Big Gantt is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 400$ for 50 users (250$ for 25 users; 800$ for 100 users). Try it

2. The Pivot Gadget

The Pivot Gadget is a tool for transforming your raw data into meaningful and useful information for analysis, planning and reporting. It provides you with a gadget that aggregates data by fields across JIRA issues. The pivot gadget can be added to your dashboard and allows you to retrieve, summarize, analyze and report data by creating multi-dimensional tables with different selectable dimensions and aggregations. As dimensions you can select any enumerable basic or custom fields such as priority, project, fix version, issue type, date created, date updated, epic links, etc. Aggregations are any numerical values like time tracking data and any custom fields that can be summed up.

The gadget requires some basic configuration to select:

  • a project or a saved filter as a basis for your pivot
  • dimensions and aggregations
  • a timetracking unit
  • date granularity and a refresh interval

When it’s done, you should arrange dimensions and aggregations in the table by dragging and dropping items in corresponding boxes (filter, columns, rows, measures).

Some more features and details:

  • The pivot can be created based on a filter or a JIRA project
  • Time tracking information is collected in multiple ways (original estimate, remaining estimate, time spent for: any issue, all subtasks or the combination of both)
  • Estimates can be displayed as pretty print or in weeks, days, hours, minutes
  • Several date granularity options to select how dates should be segmented. It can be by quarter, month, week or drill-down
  • Setting how often the gadget is updated

Pricing: The Pivot Gadget is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 275$ for 50 users (150$ for 25 users; 500$ for 100 users). Try it

3. Agile Estimates for JIRA

With Agile Estimates for JIRA each team member can participate in estimating how many story points are required to complete a particular issue while planning sprints in JIRA Agile. This plugin adds the estimation panel into the Issue Detail View. Once an issue is selected for voting, each participant of a sprint planning meeting suggests their estimation by voting. One can see estimations provided by others only when voting is finished. Later on, the team can discuss the results and have another voting session. This way you are likely to get realistic estimates and have your team committed to fulfilling tasks in time.

Some more features and details:

  • 4 different ways to enable the estimation panel
  • 4 options to select an issue for voting
  • The badge of an active issue is blue, which makes it easy-to-see
  • Clicking an active issue turns on Follow mode, which means when another issue becomes active, it is automatically opened on your board
  • When any other issue is viewed rather than an active one, you are warned with a yellow exclamation mark icon. Clicking the link in the warning message takes you to the active issue
  • In the participants list, participants are sorted by votes
  • When the team agrees on an estimate, it’s possible to fill in and save the estimate value

Pricing: Agile Estimates for JIRA is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 600$ for 50 users (350$ for 25 users; 1000$ for 100 users). Try it

4. Domat Pomodoro

Domat Pomodoro is a time management tool based on the Pomodoro Technique concept. It’s meant to help you stay focused and be more productive by breaking down work into 25 minute long “pomodori” separated by short breaks. It works per issue. With Domat Pomodoro being installed, you can start a timer in the View Issue screen of any of your JIRA issues. As you hit the start domat button, a timer shows up and starts counting down 25 minutes. It’s possible to pause or smash (stop) your domat at any point. When the time is up, you get a notification and an alarm goes off. Once the break time is over, you are suggested to start another domat. Completed domats are displayed as tomatoes in the My Domats section, so you can tell at a glance how many 25 minute iterations have been made on this or that task.

Pricing: Domat Pomodoro is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 50$ for 50 users (25$ for 25 users; 100$ for 100 users). Try it

5. Surveys for Service Desk

Surveys for Service Desk allows you to create surveys to evaluate customer satisfaction with your support. It makes gathering customer support ratings and feedback very easy, as once created and activated, surveys are sent automatically based on their trigger point and frequency settings. The creation of a basic survey is simple and intuitive. You just go through a few steps and your survey is done. Each survey is associated with one JIRA project. Survey results are provided in 4 types of report available in the Survey Report section of the project overview.

Some more features and details:

  • Using placeholder JIRA fields when creating your survey header and footer
  • Optional 1-5 star rating form and a text box for a customer review are available in the template
  • Specifying a transition to which status triggers sending a survey
  • Setting frequency with which a survey is sent (e.g. for every single, second or fifth trigger)
  • Success message
  • Custom email templates that can be embedded in support agent’s email signature

Pricing: Surveys for Service Desk is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 400$ for 50 users (200$ for 25 users; 700$ for 100 users). Try it

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    Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Confluence – First Quarter 2015

    April 2, 2015
    #Confluence
    9 min

    New add-ons for Atlassian products are constantly coming out on the Marketplace. It’s rather hard to keep up and not to miss anything useful that’s been recently introduced by Atlassian vendors. Just like you, our StiltSoft team tries to stay up-to-date with new releases and additions. We appreciate your time and are loving to share our knowledge and work. Therefore, here comes the series of posts ‘Top New Add-ons for Atlassian Products’, in which I’ll be telling you about some of the best add-ons that have appeared on the Marketplace for Confluence, JIRA and Stash since the beginning of 2015.

    Today’s post highlights top 5 new add-ons for Confluence:

    I’m going to cover the problems the add-ons intend to solve, possible benefits for you and pricing. I won’t be judgmental, as being new on the market, it’s obvious that the plugins are only at the beginning of their journey and require some time to become glossy and rich in functionality.

    1. Easy Forms for Confluence

    Easy Forms for Confluence allows you to easily create and insert forms on your Confluence pages. It comes with two macros. The Easy Form macro is for adding and editing forms. And the Easy Form Report macro provides a dynamic report with submission results, which can be exported in XML, JSON, CSV or XLS.

    Some other handy features:

    • Adding and rearranging form fields by drag&drop.
    • Restricting editing forms via setting Confluence page permissions.
    • E-mail and workbox notifications about form submissions.
    • Allowing single or multiple submissions per user.

    Pricing: Easy Forms for Confluence is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 120$ for 25 users; 220$ for 50 users; 400$ for 100 users.  Try it

    2. Lively Blog Posts

    Lively Blog Posts provides you with the macro you can use to display a blog posts feed on a Confluence page and dashboard. In addition to the functionality similar to the native Confluence Blog Posts Macro, this add-on offers some unique features:

    • Adding a teaser image. To select a teaser image, label it with “teaser” in the image properties panel or in page attachments.
    • Displaying highlighted posts at the top of the feed. To highlight a post, label it with ‘important’.
    • Setting the teaser text length.
    • Including the Lively Blog Posts macro on the Confluence dashboard by configuring the add-on settings in Confluence administration.

    Pricing: Lively Blog Posts is available for Server instances and is free. Try it

    3. Staffing Timeline

    Staffing Timeline is a tool for planning resource allocation across different projects. To get started, insert the Staffing Timeline macro on a Confluence page and go through simple configuration. Basically, you just add your project names and users, associate them, specify working hours of each person and global non-working days. Once done and saved, you get an illustrative chart with a timeline.

    Being minimalistic, Staffing Timeline provides all the basic features you might need without any excesses. Plus, it’s rather flexible, easy to use and informative:

    • You get to switch between project and user views.
    • It’s very convenient to navigate the timeline by dragging.
    • The timeline can be zoomed in or out.
    • You can view the change history.

    Pricing: Staffing Timeline is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 15$ for 25 users; 20$ for 50 users; 50$ for 100 users. Try it

    4. Homepage Redirect Add-on

    Homepage Redirect Add-on makes it possible for Confluence administrators to set different homepages for different user groups. When one Confluence instance is used by multiple teams and diverse customer groups with unique needs and values, it’s convenient and user-friendly to redirect individual Confluence users to a homepage tailored especially for their user group.

    A space homepage, a blog post or a Confluence page can be used as the redirect destination. All you’ve got to do is map your user groups and homepages in the Homepage Redirect section of Confluence administration.

    Pricing: Homepage Redirect Add-on is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 20$ for 25 users; 50$ for 50 users; 80$ for 100 users. Try it

    5. Baselines for Confluence

    Baselines for Confluence allows you to create baseline sets of all Confluence pages within one space at a particular point in time. Confluence core Page History is not always enough, since it only provides you with a means to view the history of one specific page. And in this case, if you need to see several pages the way they were a week ago, you should look for the right version of each page. With Baselines for Confluence, you save a collection of links to documents versions that correspond to a specific moment in time. So you can go back to a certain baseline and see all space pages versions of that time.

    Among other benefits:

    • Setting user groups that can view and edit Baselines.
    • Selecting documents based on keywords. If you provide a keyword in the “What did you change?” field when saving pages, you can use that keyword while creating a baseline. The latest document version of each document with the given keyword in its change description will be included in the baseline.

    You should pay attention to the fact that currently there’s no connection between links in a baseline set. That means you are supposed to follow each link separately to see the relevant older versions of your documents. As well, if a page or its version is deleted from the space, that document version will not be accessible in the baseline set.

    Pricing: Baselines for Confluence is available for Server instances. Its commercial license costs 100$ for 25 users; 150$ for 50 users; 250$ for 100 users. Try it

     

    Hopefully, some of the add-ons from today’s overview turn out to be something you can use to facilitate and improve your collaboration in Confluence.

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