When it comes to understanding the progress of work in Jira, Atlassian has some great options natively within Jira Service Management. Queues are available in each Service Management project in Jira and Dashboards are available in all Jira products. These features give users important insight into what teams are working on, but how do you know when to use which, and why? Having easy access to the progress of work in the system, as well as some of the stats that go along with the quality and completion of the work, is essential for any team's success. Below, I'll discuss the functionality of Queues and Dashboards in Jira and when one should be used over the other. 

What are queues?

Queues are groups of customer requests that appear in Jira Service Management projects. They are used by service desk agents to organize customer requests allowing the team to assign and complete customer requests quickly and efficiently. There are a few helpful queues that come with your service desk, but Jira Admins can also create custom queues if the ones in place are not the correct fit for the team. 

What are Dashboards?

A Dashboard is a page of reports and data visuals related to issues in Jira. Dashboards are customizable and can be tailored to meet the needs of various users throughout the organization. Individual users often create their own Dashboards to easily visualize what outstanding work they specifically need to get done. Teams can use them to see their overall progress of work. Management can use them to get a more high-level overview of the progress of work across the entire organization. Gadgets make up Dashboards and are often based on Jira filters or JQL. They typically come in the form of charts, tables, or lists. Dashboards are available no matter what kind of Jira project you're working in.

When to use queues vs. Dashboards?

Queues are great for agents and other folks who need to work on issues in a service management project. If queues are broken up by SLA's and/or priority, they help agents determine which issues are most urgent and need to be worked on ASAP. Then, agents can easily grab issues from the list and begin working on them. Queues don't give you any stats or overall status on work that's in progress or has yet to be completed. It's simply a way for those working on Jira tickets to organize them and decide what to work on.

While queues are limited to a single project, Dashboards can be used across multiple projects. They give more information on the work and can provide more details such as the time from creation to resolution, how many issues of a particular type were submitted in a given time period, and which agents completed the most issues. Dashboards are perfect for users who need to get an overview of what's going on, but don't necessarily need to work on the issues. Since Dashboards are meant for viewing Jira data, these pages are perfect to give higher-level users an insight into what's going on with the outstanding work. Using gadgets, these users can see where improvements need to be made if, for example, SLAs are continuously breached. They can also be used to see what works well for your teams. 

You have questions?  We have answers!  Contact us to schedule a call with one of our Atlassian experts.

Customer Satisfaction, or CSAT, is a customer experience metric measuring satisfaction with a product, service or support interaction. The metric is captured through a short simple survey to enable the customer to provide their feedback.

CSAT in Jira Service Management

Did you know that your customer feedback is collected by default within Jira Service Management Projects? This means that when an issue is resolved, the customer receives an email requesting their feedback through a simple question such as "How satisfied were you with our service?". That simple question is editable, and can be defined by your project admin.

Remember, if you're utilizing next-gen projects, site administrator access is required to edit your CSAT survey question

There's a handy Satisfaction report built into Jira Service Management, visible to project administrators and agents. This report displays average customer satisfaction scores, as well as individual scores and comments for the team. You can toggle the report anywhere from the past 48 hours, all the way up to the past year by month!

It's also possible to configure your own custom report to track satisfaction trends. For example, you may want to see satisfaction by assignee, satisfaction by service request, or even a trend graph to track satisfaction changes over time.

The Pros of CSAT

CSAT, a very popular methodology, offers a quick and easy way to entice customers to give feedback. This then provides a clear metric for you to understand customer expectations, and work to exceed them. With CSAT enabled, your customers will receive a survey every time their request is resolved. This enables you to track customer satisfaction at different stages of their journey with your team, making bottlenecks and areas for improvement clear, with very little effort on your part.

CSAT also offers a fast way to compare yourself to your peers. According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), the average CSAT score across the nation is 76.5% - that's just over 3/4 of your customers reporting a satisfying experience. This figure differs by industry - you may not be too surprised to hear that, in 2019, Internet Service Providers and Subscription Television Services reported low CSAT benchmarks of 62%, while Breweries reported a much more favorable CSAT benchmark of 85%. But remember, while it is useful to be able to compare yourself to your competition, the true value from CSAT comes when you analyze and utilize feedback to drive continuous improvement and better your own customer experience.

Considerations of CSAT

While CSAT is a useful metric to track, there are a few considerations to take into account. The customer who takes the time to fill out their satisfaction is likely one who is happy with the service they received. Customers who are unhappy, or just moderately satisfied, are less likely to complete the survey, which can skew the data. CSAT has also been found to be a poor measure of loyalty - although poor CSAT scores can predict attrition, a high CSAT score has not been found to be a reliable predictor of repeat business. Cultural differences should also be taken into account - different standards and expectations will affect the score that customers are driven to pick, which, in part, can make it difficult to understand true customer satisfaction.

So, CSAT isn't a unicorn which can address all customer concerns with support. However, it does offer a valuable insight; one which should be paired with other tools to track and measure customer satisfaction. At Praecipio, we can help you make the most out of the benefits of collecting CSAT in Jira Service Management, and use those results along with other anecdotal evidence such as customer comments, number of tickets raised, cadence call discussions, and repeat business, to drive change, improve your customer offerings, and ultimately, reap the rewards!

In today’s business environment, high-speed implementation is a must. This applies to all products and services. Suppose you were using an application and got stuck because of a bug: after reporting the bug, you expect the team to fix it as soon as possible. If not, your next move is probably going to be switching to another service.

Software companies want teams working together providing quick and on point solutions to save time and resources, which can only be accomplished by the involvement of all of the teams working on a project. That’s why companies are opting for testing with Agile teams, since it allows for a greater collaboration across teams on a project. 

Agile allows a key collaboration between testing teams and developers which can’t always be accomplished with traditional approaches. It enables testers to share their perspective from the start of the sprint planning; this leads to less bugs during testing and creates a better possibility for sprint delivery dates to be met on time.

Let’s dig a little deeper to understand what this means.

The objective of Agile/sprints/scrum 

Agile methodologies were born as an alternative to traditional software development approaches, like waterfall methodology. 

The following images show the big difference between agile and waterfall methodologies. (Source)

On one hand we can see that the traditional approach (Waterfall) aims to understand user needs and develop a product. After development, testers test the product and report bugs before deployment. The development team then works on them and fixes any errors using the best possible solution. This is progress through phases, one starts only when the previous one ends; this does not create an opportunity for proper feedback or collaboration between testing, developers and users teams.

On the other hand, Agile is mainly focused on performing constant, small deliveries of the product in order for the customer to be able to see how the product advances through the lifecycle. This gives the opportunity for testing to take on a bigger role and to get involved at an early stage of product development and throughout all the lifecycle of the product.

Agile has four important values:

1. The focus should be more on individuals and interactions instead of processes and tools

2. Working software is more important than comprehensive documentation

3. Customer collaboration is more vital than contract negotiation

4. The process should respond to change rather than follow a plan

Testing in sprint planning: The goal of sprint planning

During sprint planning, the team discusses which stories they will focus on in the upcoming sprint based on aspects like priorities, time frame, feasibility, etc.

The whole team involved in the development of the product should be involved, and if additional expertise on specific backlog tasks is required, then stakeholders can also be part of it.

Sometimes, during this meeting, the testing team can take a secondary role since the main focus tends to be on the development of the stories; this is understandable since it will set the start of the sprint. However, the testing team's' perspective can lead to some serious benefits for developers.

Why testing should be involved

One flaw of working in traditional testing (i.e. Waterfall methodology) is that during the test case design phase, although testers receive the requirements, most of the time they don't get access to the software they will test until it is time to begin the test execution phase.  It is well known that there is usually a big gap between what a requirement specifies and the actual software developed. 

This leads to a huge time investment on the testing side to reach out to both developers and users to define how the product works and how it should work in order to define the correct test scenarios and test cases.

Agile methodologies give testers the opportunity to be involved in the development of the product from the get-go. Testers can be involved in the design of the software by working closely with developers to assess and advise on testability aspects.

An Agile tester should understand the relevance of technical skills. A tester is always prepared to contribute to the technical discussions of the team. Their contribution may extend up to code reviews, user stories grooming, and understanding requirements. The Agile Software Tester gets to work with the developers when they are performing unit testing and share the perspective of testing from a tester's point of view instead of a developer's. The tester can work collaboratively and productively with the product owner and the customer to form acceptance criteria from the sprint planning itself. 

Before any user story is sent for development, the tester and other team members can discuss the complete user story with the team members to find out what the customer wants. Having testers collaborate with developers from the very beginning of sprint planning helps to achieve more accurate estimations and to ensure that everyone has some testing tasks as part of their responsibilities

Great testing teams know they need to become an extension of the customer and end user. Testers need to understand the customer's needs: an Agile tester should be able to describe the feature as well as the customer.

Drop us a line for expert advice on testing and all things Agile, we'd love to help your teams achieve their true potential.

Are you an enterprise company looking for a tool to support your Agile processes at scale? Do you find that you've grown beyond the capabilities of Portfolio for Jira? Jira Align is jam-packed with features that will make Business Owners, Program Managers, and all other planning people rejoice by providing a tool that is designed with Scaled Agile Best practices in mind (SAFe, DaD, LeSS). Below are some of the key features within Jira Align that will make planning and tracking easier than ever before.

Portfolio Strategy Management

Jira Align provides top-down alignment by providing a visualization of what the business is doing through Strategic Snapshots. Gone are the days where the mission, vision, and value are created and forgotten until the next planning cycle. The Snapshot becomes a one-stop shop for setting the company's "why" which is displayed as a button throughout the product. Now, it's easy to see and track the goals the company is marching towards. 

Backlogs and Workflows to Keep Big Items on Track

Effectively manage your biggest work items (Epics/Initiatives) utilizing Backlogs and Kanban boards. Similar to Jira, global ranking is applied so the most important items are at the top. 

Roadmap

Understand what your PI looks like and the number of stories that will be worked in each sprint. Progress bar shading provides indication of the level of completeness. The Roadmap is populated with live information which takes its use beyond planning and into execution reporting. 

Program Boards to Guide Execution 

Big Room Planning is a big deal. Ensuring that all the Initiatives, Objectives, Dependencies, and Risks are captured and agreed upon is a full time job, but is vital to the success of the planning meeting. Jira Align recognizes the importance and provides the Program Board feature that allows for Teams to see these critical touch points in an easy layout. The Program Board, like all reports, is constantly updated with the latest information so teams and management can stay on top of the plan as it's being executed.

Ultimate Customizable Dashboard a.k.a. Program Room 

The Program Room is an information radiator of the health of the project. This one stop shop is a customizable dashboard laying out key data points that will help management keep tabs on what's important to them. Now decisions can be made on active live data without the need to collect data from disparate sources. 

We think you'd also be interested in our webinar, Proving Value: How Business Leaders Use Jira Align to Connect Strategy and Execution.

Time to get Aligned!

These five features are barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what Jira Align can do for organizations. This is a feature-rich product designed for enterprise businesses that are ready to take the next step in scaling their agile practice. Not sure where to start? No worries - we have you covered! Praecipio is ready to provide services around agile transformations and implementing Jira Align solutions that will get everyone moving in the same direction.

About Dashboards and Gadgets

The Jira Dashboards is the first screen you see when you log in to Jira. It can be configured to display many different types of information, depending on your areas of interest.

If you are anywhere else in Jira, you can access your Jira Dashboards view by clicking the ‘Dashboards‘ link in the top left corner of the Jira interface.

The information boxes on the dashboard are called Gadgets: 

If your user account has only one dashboard, the tabs on the left of the browser window will not be available and the dashboard will occupy the full window width.

 

You can easily customise your dashboard by choosing a different layout, adding more gadgets, dragging the gadgets into different positions, and changing the look of individual gadgets.

You can also create more pages for your dashboard, share your pages with other people and choose your favorites pages, as described in Managing Multiple Dashboard Pages. Each page can be configured independently, as per the instructions below.

 See the big list of all Atlassian gadgets for more ideas.

* This gadget will only be available if it has been installed by your Jira administrator.

 

The Firebug add-on for Firefox can significantly degrade the performance of web pages. If Jira is running too slowly (the Jira dashboard, in particular) then we recommend that you disable Firebug. Read this FAQ for instructions.

 

Creating a Dashboard

The dashboard that you see when you first start using Jira is a “default” dashboard that has been configured by your Jira administrator. You cannot edit the default dashboard; but you can easily create your own dashboard, which you can then customize as you wish.

To create your own dashboard:

1. At the top right of the Dashboard, click the ‘Tools‘ menu.
2. Select either ‘Create Dashboard‘ to create a blank dashboard, or ‘Copy Dashboard‘ to create a copy of the dashboard you are currently viewing.

You can now customize your dashboard as follows:

 

If you are using multiple dashboard pages, you can only configure dashboard pages that you own.

 

Choosing a Dashboard Layout

To choose a different layout for your dashboard page (e.g. three columns instead of two):

1. At the top right of the Dashboard, click the ‘Edit Layout‘ link. A selection of layouts will be displayed:
   
2. Click your preferred layout.

Adding a Gadget

1. At the top right of the Dashboard, click the ‘Add Gadget‘ link.
2. A selection of gadgets will be displayed:
   
    Select a category on the left to restrict the list of gadgets on the right to that category.
3. Click the ‘Add it now‘ button beneath your chosen gadget.
4. Click the ‘Finished‘ button to return to your Dashboard.
5. If the gadget you have selected requires configuration, you will be presented with the gadget’s configuration page. Configure appropriately and click ‘Save‘.

Moving a Gadget

To move a gadget to a different position on your dashboard:

• Click the gadget and drag it into its new position.

Removing a Gadget

To remove a gadget from your dashboard:

1. Hold your mouse over the top right corner of the gadget, until a down-arrow appears.
2. Click the down-arrow to display the following menu:       
   
3. Click ‘Delete‘.

Need some more help navigating Jira Dashboards? Learn more about Jira here, or contact our team of experts and we’ll answer any questions you may have.

Altassian’s Jira is perhaps the best issue tracking and software development management platform around. While Jira can be used in many, many ways, it’s found a sweet spot in the gaming industry.

This post assumes the reader has a reasonable understanding of Jira. The post highlights how Jira and Greenhopper – which collectively make up Atlassian’s Agile approach – can streamline game development. Check it out:

Quick-start projects. In Jira, you can start a new project in less than five minutes. That’s great for developers, since new projects can spawn at anytime during the production process.

Attach files for visual reference. Most developers use Adobe software to design game interfaces. During the development stage, there are usually multiple people designing and updating prototypes – so it’s easy to get off track. With Jira, designers can attach the a screenshot of the latest prototype to a project page, so every one involved with the project can see where the interface is at and stay on the same page. And since Jira allows users to attach files to projects, tasks, time log items, and more, it’s easy for designers to offer team members a visual reference of where they’re at – even if they’re not in the office.

Support and ticketing. Jira helps IT support organizations handle hardware and software support more methodically. Support tickets can be submitted by anyone within the company. From there, they’re assigned to a qualified expert, and either resolved or escalated. This obviously benefits all businesses and not just those in the gaming industry. But for game developers on a tight schedule, hardware performance is critical – and a fast ticketing process ensures minimal downtime.

Bug tracking. Bug tracking is critical in the gaming industry. Jira’s organized, intuitive bug tracking system allows game developers to track the details, status, etc of every kink in the development process – ensuring better performance.

Document repository. Jira can also act as a document repository for files of all types. With a powerful search feature and page indexing capabilities, game companies can ensure quick access to important files – so long as they’re organized responsibly.

Crucible. A web based code review tool, Atlassian’s Crucible (a “friend” of Jira and Greenhopper) allows multiple people to review code online instead of having to crowd around a desktop or overhead projector – the “Google Docs” of code-writing. For game developers, that kind of collaboration is worth its weight in gold.

Greenhopper task tracking. Drag-and-drop task management that associates tasks with Jira projects, items, files, etc, etc. Completely intuitive, remarkably fast. We needn’t say more.

Customize to your heart’s content. Jira is easily and extensively customizable. Most of its customizations don’t require technical knowledge – so designers and developers with different skillsets can configure Jira with ease.

Insanely easy workflows. You don’t have to be a programmer to set workflows up in Jira. Develop workflows quickly to automate repetitive tasks.

Integration with non-Atlassian tools. Jira users can develop their own plug-ins to import and export data to and from Jira. This is crucial, since no software can tackle every need within an organization, and since game developers usually need to leverage multiple tools throughout their production.

That’s how game developers are leveraging Atlassian tools to streamline operations and production timelines. Again, it’s worth noting that much of what’s covered above applies to business of all types – not just those in the gaming industry. Check out our Jira blogs to learn more about how Jira (and “friends“)  can boost your operations.

Special note: If you’ll be attending South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin in March 2011, stop by our booth at the SXSWi Trade Show. We’ll have a Jira demo live, and have our developers behind the table!