One thing not mentioned in Linden Lab’s look back at 2012 was the change to the Jira. Now it would be easy to rant and rave about why this was a poor decision, but I’ll try to be objective and try to understand what Linden Lab are trying to achieve here.
The one issue I can see with the old way the Jira worked is the amount of noise, with the new Jira there has certainly been a reduction in noise, because except in cases such as the CHUI Project, where people can comment on other people’s Jira’s, we largely end up with Jira’s where only a select few residents, the reporter and Lindens can read and comment on.
Less people commenting will in some cases make it easier to identify the issue, but it also hits collaboration, where people with good feedback, are unable to provide it in the original report. Reading someone else’s comments, can help focus your own comments in important areas.
I recently created a Jira, it got imported to a project that I couldn’t see, so in effect, even as the reporter, I couldn’t see it. This was fixed, but then I couldn’t comment on it. The only way I could update my report was by editing my own report. Now by this stage I could see other Jira’s in this project, so I was able to reference another report, the reporter on the other report then referenced my Jira to update their own report. We had collaboartion between two reporters.
Now to be fair to Linden Lab here, they explained to me that there was an issue with editing permissions in this project, this was very politely explained to me by a Linden and I appreciate that they took the time to inform me about the issue.
Continue reading “Jira Changes Are Hurting Collaboration”
