I have used JIRA for something like 5 years now. I am a big fan, in that it is definitely the best issue tracking solution out there. However I’m also quite critical of it at times, because I think it often fails in usability and UI terms to deliver an intuitive experience for those doing software (and particularly web) development.

So I thought I’d write some initial views on the Jira 4 UI and GreenHopper – my hope being that GreenHopper will alleviate some of my release planning frustrations with Out-of-the-box Jira. These are most definitely first impressions. Any major UI changes are likely to be met by resistance by seasoned users of any application.

First, the good:

• Jira’s main dashboard UI etc looks cleaner, drop-down menus for quickly getting to specific projects are welcome
• The whole thing feels less cluttered because the right hand side bar which, in my experience was almost never used by most JIRA users, has been taken away
• The drop-down action menu for each result in an issue navigator search is great
• The activity stream stuff is very helpful

Now, the contentious core JIRA stuff:

• I now feel like I have no issues. If only it were true. The whole JIRA UI feels “too” sparse, I feel like I cannot see my workload properly any more / the status of the project. A prime example is when you click on a project version and are shown the version summary tab which seems to show at max 3 updated + 3 “Due” issues. What use is that? Doesn’t seem configurable. UPDATE: Brian Lane, JIRA product manager has told me this is configurable in a configuration file but not in the UI, where the setting jira.project.summary.max.issues=3 can be found.
• Roadmap view – for me at least – is completely useless now. It no longer shows all issues for a version if there are “too many”. This should at least be configurable and behave like old Jira by default. Its an imperfect world. Some of us have 170 issues in a version What’s more the issues are sorted obscurely – you’d assume if only showing 50 issues it would show the 30 unresolved issues, but for me shows about 8 of those and 40+ resolved ones. Roadmap does not show me my roadmap, I have to drop into issue navigator
• I hate portlets. For dashboard overview stuff, fine – but they are used in other places too eg project overview, which feel like UI/usability cop-out. Its not Web 2.0, its iGoogle. Portlets are too generic to make any app feel seamless.
• “advanced” searching with some new Jira QL is enabled by default it seems, which I think is a mistake. Bring back the good old simple search for most users by default. UPDATE: Brian Lane also told me that this is not the case, it is not on by default. I don’t know how it became on for me though.

Next, my first impressions of GreenHopper:

• GreenHopper is very specific to a particular Agile methodology and “card” (or post-it) metaphor. This IMO is enough to make it a total WTF for any users who are not Agile Scrumbag 3rd Dan Blackbelt Extremists. That includes me.
• I was hoping for drag and drop planning of issues eg assigning them to people and versions in the roadmap. This is there, to a degree. GreenHopper is major overkill for the majority of users – and yet with no DnD scheduling in core Jira, you have little choice if you want to avoid the horribly repetitious standard Jira workflow steps to change fix-for on issues during planning where batch changes are not that workable as they require scanning all the issues before making your changes.
• The UI is highly functional for the specific metaphor and methodology, but is frankly insane for every day users. It makes me feel ill trying to using it. Too much colour. Too many options. Too small fonts. Web 2.0 was years ago, we’re allowed to use a font > 12px high now you know!

Things I want day to day but can’t seem to achieve even with the power of Greenhopper and Jira 4:

• Drag issues to become subtasks of a parent
• See a “tree” of issues as a list eg parent issues with subtask issues shown below them
• Get an instant view of how close we are to the top-level features (parent tasks) being completed – eg the red/green bar of subtask completion for all parent tasks, shown in a flat list. Don’t get me started on the “Task board” of GreenHopper. Powerful yes. For mortals? No way.
• JIRA completely lacks the personal element commonly found in Web 2.0 apps – avatars for user accounts. Github has this, so do most other hosted web 2.0 apps. Its a real omission and means functionality like “drop issue onto user’s face to assign it” is not yet possible.

JIRA is very powerful, has had some solid UI improvements, but ultimately I think from a web-app developer’s point of view it is now weakened by its un-opinionated and excessively generic underpinnings. This can be seen by the way GreenHopper had to shoehorn its way into JIRA UI with some truly ugly configuration screens, mismatched fonts, general lack of integrated look and feel – and popup windows with standard Jira issue edit screens in.

It feels like JIRA is still firmly rooted in the waterfall-approach era. It has been very successful by trying to please everybody, but I feel that it is not yet up to the task of truly excellent web-development tracking – although it certainly remains the best option out there at this time in my opinion.

The GreenHopper plugin tries to bring a visual metaphor to all this, and that is welcome. However I think the visual metaphor of just dragging issues in the normal JIRA roadmap view would work a lot better for 90% of users than the agile “card” approach and all the steroids that those UI screens have been given.

I hope this doesn’t come across as too negative. Both products are a move in the right direction and there’s no way you can do wrong with the currently special offer pricing that’s for sure.

However I hoped for a bit more progress in Jira’s UI for release planning etc out of the box - I wrote about these desires way back in 2006 - and GreenHopper despite normally being a premium product for exactly this, in my opinion fails to meet the needs of real-world users (eg the ones who don’t live in an Agile methodology bubble).