How to upsmart JIRA without dumbing it down?
Posted on: May 3, 2007You may've heard of Public JIRA aka our Issue Tracker. Before I continue, I'll preface this post, saying I'm familiar with all the common complaints. How could I possibly? Because they're the same ones I've had myself.
When I first started using the internal implementation of JIRA @ Linden Lab, it was spooky. Like ENIAC, one of those impregnable old-skool computers. It felt big and bulky, slow to tread through, and still does. But you know what? You either let the machine pwn your ass, or you kick it first. And that's exactly what I did — through sheer persistence and determination, I've become one of LL's most prolific and experienced JIRA users, and I wouldn't have gotten here without help from my fab fellow Lindens. I continue to ask questions to this day to learn more; for example, I recently checked with Rob Linden if Public JIRA issues entered by Lindens can automatically be imported internally, because there's a lot of duplication and things that need to be entered twice… bad redundancy!
OK then, so let me bring this up: I've heard many Residents say they want to know more about how our internal processes work, what we're actually doing with issues, so they can get a better "look under the hood". I get a lot of pleas for openness and transparency here. Understood — that's exactly why we have the Issue Tracker, which is a somewhat simplified version of our internal tracking system. Both run on Atlassian JIRA software (thanx to Mario for helping me out with quicksearch Q today!), and the internal one is at over 40,000+ issues, while the public one, PJIRA for short, just capped 1,000+, a usage surge prompted by recent Official Linden Blog posts and our recent Town Hall feat. Cory Linden which mentioned the Issue Tracker several times.
Unlike ever before, you're now empowered to go beyond reporting bugs (and feeling like they went into a black hole). You can find bugs others have filed, add info to existing ones, link related ones together, and so on and so forth. You're not at a loss to long-describe bugs like "That one where I teleport and hair ends up in my butt!", we've got issue #s — that one's VWR-374. Hence why it's an issue tracker.
So, now you can also see the complexity, the sheer overwhelmingness of what I look at on a daily basis. At least part of it. It helps give perspective. I listen to Resi complaints when they say "You Lindens don't know what it's like to live in our world!" which makes little sense to me worded like that, because we're in this together — we're all in Second Life. But the crux here, of course, is there are bugs encountered on a day-to-day basis that you won't really know about unless you get slammed by them again and AgAiN and AGAIN ARGHHHH! How do I know? Because it's happened to me, not hundreds, but thousands of times.
The converse is also true here. By opening up our procedures to Residents, we invite room for improvement (unlike the soon-to-be-obsoleted Feature Voting Tool, PJIRA lets Residents discuss and resolve each others' issues), as well as share some frustrations of our own. I'm frenzylicious about better tools, but I have to admit, after using JIRA so much, I'm a lot more comfortable with it, and that's true for just about anything with a learning curve. There are some basic bugs we'd like to solve — e.g., a smoother login process, or logging in from secondlife.com logs you into PJIRA and the SL Wiki too — would be nice.
But nevertheless, it's very eye-opening.
I love tools that bring complicated wizardry to the masses. Apple's iMovie is a great example. But in all the time I was researching better company and Resident-facing tools in the last few months, I didn't find a Web 2.0-friendly equivalent to Flickr in the support (Knowledge Base) and issue tracking depths. Good software can take time to mature too, or maybe there's a really big hole in the market someone oughta seize. I don't know.
But what I do know is as bad as it might seem for some, those people have obviously never seen the heinously crawling RT ticket tracking system (by Best Practical) we're weaning off of. Gosh, I got lost in that thing a lot. Or know that we used Bugzilla internally before JIRA.
With all of this comes a phase of acclimation. People get used to stuff. I know of many times when I was all SHOCKSHOCKHORRORAHHH! then calmed down weeks later, more confident in my ability to use a tool. And I can't ever emphasize being self-resourceful about help enough, which is why we've provided Issue Tracker instructions, and I think there's an unfolding opportunity for Residents to teach each other. Those who are easily frustrated-but-curious types (count me in!) would benefit greatly.
So, if you want to report some bugs, don't expect it to all work out on your first day. And that's alright. I made my share of fool's errors, but we don't start growups. We must learn to crawl before we walk… then run… then fly!
And if you have suggestions for bettering JIRA and making it easier based on your favorable experience with tools, by all means, file an issue within the Issue Tracker, or create a new Second Life Wiki page with tips, and ping me at torley at lindenlab dot com about it. Thanxies! 
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May 5th, 2007 at 2:36 AM PDT
Welll if you want a suggestion of what I think a better system would look like - look no further than Ubuntu's Launchpad (www.launchpad.net). Go to the opening page of Launchpad and compare it to Jira. Look at the bug tracking page - it's very, very simple (and it would be easy to add on a bug importance voting tool on to it while preserving the simplicity of the interface).
But part of the problem isn't Jira: it's that you have two audiences, and are trying to cater to both of them with a single tool. On the one hand, you have the open source community around SL, which needs access to proper bug fixing tools. These guys are technical, and need a tool which works in a technical sense.
Unfortunately, these guys are also a tiny minority of your audience. The majority of the people who will report issues are non-technical users - and for them, Jira is complex, over-engineered, and impenetrable. And launchpad is better, (the Answers tool alone would be massively important for you going forward), but it's not perfect.
So here's what I'd suggest. What you need to create is a front end to Jira which walks someone through reporting an issue, in plain English (and German, and Italian, and French… because 61% of your users are outside the US etc etc). It should start with a single, big button that says "Report a problem". On the next page, it should narrow down what the problem is, by sensible categories that relate to Second Life: Inventory, Teleporting, Building and so on. On the next step, it shows you the top five reported issues within those categories, and asks you if the problem is the same as one of them. If it is, you can select the problem and add any extra details to the bottom (that problem would also get an extra vote on it for importance). If it isn't - and only then - you get to file a full bug report - but again, this needs to be laid out in a step-by-step approach.
Once reported, people who've opted in should have any further info on that bug emailed to them. But you could also do more, if you wanted:
1. When a bug is assigned to someone or they pick it up, they could create ad-hoc testing groups in-world from people who've suffered from that bug to get updates on progress and/or volunteer to test fixes on beta grid, if they're up there.
2. Developers should ALWAYS note their progress on fixing something they've picked up, preferably daily and certainly no less than weekly. If someone's picked up a bug and isn't getting anywhere, they should be open about that. If they can provide any technical details on what they think the problem is, they may get good feedback.
Sorry this comment has ended up so long! But I hope it's helpful.
May 5th, 2007 at 4:50 AM PDT
JIRA is quite complicated and demands a lot of the user - for starters it asks a working knowlegde of English which goes beyond what most high school students in non-English speaking countries get. It can also get highly complicated if people start digging into technicalities. JIRA has a very high threshold - you know I am quite outspoken about things, but I haven't filed a single complaint yet.
Another problem is the openness of the system. SVC-124 was almost closed by someone who judged all by himself that it was not a LL problem - someone who does not suffer from the problems himself. I can envisage 'battles' in the future where one person keeps upgrading and another keeps downgrading a problem. Not a pretty sight, and it will raise irritation levels to the max.
JIRA, in short, is great for English speakers with computer knowlegde beyond average user levels. I guess that the rest of the SL community could do with an easier complaint system. User friendliness should be the key there. I am thinking of simple, standard questions which can be answered, perhaps in French or German as well. A step-by-step description of the problem can be formed by answering those, giving LL at least a reasonable idea of what's going on.
I see my comments overlap those of Ian for the most part, but I'll add them nonetheless.
May 6th, 2007 at 1:53 PM PDT
@Ian: I'll check out Launchpad; I wonder if what you describe could be used in a conducive way with our future Knowledge Base. As you may know, we're replacing the current KB with a more comprehensive system that has a step-by-step "Solution Finder" (I joke and call it "Stairway to Help"). Part of the impregnable problem with JIRA is difficult searching.
Discussion related to (1) independently came up related to the dang group IM problems, so it may be emerging on its own out of necessity; and (2) — yes, more communication on that would be great. Part of the prob is the added overhead of having to mark stuff in internal JIRA AND its public Issue Tracker counterpart, and while I generalize, developers usually want to fix bugs instead of talk about them, so I suspect there's more an opportunity for a blooming role here for community-type Lindens to share visible progress. (I've already been doing this to some extent; again, out of necessity.)
@Laetizia: You make an astute point about the international aspects of this, I'm actually shocked I haven't heard anyone else observe it, but I'm glad you did. (I'm curious what bug-tracking systems may be popular around the world?)
Also, yeah, the flipside to allowing Residents to contribute more to issues is, we've definitely already had cases where people didn't have a clue what they were doing, and reopened issues. Open source pragmatism is lost on people who have no understanding, context, or education — and frustration compounds misuse.
Overlap in these comments points to bigger challenges good to be aware of.
Internally, Callum Linden made "JiraX" — basically, it's a simple Web 2.0-style page which is more user-appealing to file issues with. Internally, we can send some details of an issue by email to be processed by the system, but judging by past junk reports that clogged up Tools menu > Report Bug, esp. when it was under Help menu before that, there might have to be some "good friction". I notice that there've already been a visible number of misfiled issues, so the problem may not be so much "It's too hard to file an issue" as more hand-holding and "Is this what you mean?" context, as you both indicate, Laetizia and Ian. More people setting good examples also gives us a pool of experience to draw from.
These are great ideas! Learning from this will help when I talk with Rob and other JIRA-involved Lindens. Thanks for taking the time to share!
May 6th, 2007 at 4:49 PM PDT
JIRA is actually available in a couple of different languages, set to the user's preference:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/v3.7/internationalisation.html
May 13th, 2007 at 8:57 AM PDT
@Charles: Thx for the tip! I'll have to look at that within our system.