Issue Matrix for Agile Teams

Owned by Rosen Marinkov
Feb 17, 2023
5 min read

 

On this page:

Use case overview

Agile-centric technologies are designed to adapt to and optimize the work of teams by enabling them to quickly and easily access actionable information. 
This was one of the defining principles behind the development of the Issue Matrix for Jira app - enhancing the existing capabilities of Jira to accommodate the needs of Agile teams to access and work with actionable data, without the need to navigate through multiple UI pages and waste valuable time.
While Jira Software is the most comprehensive platform available for Agile teams, there are a few UI glitches that prevent users from utilizing its full potential. Issue Matrix for Jira was designed to improve the daily work of Agile teams and significantly boost their productivity by improving their user experience with Jira Software. 

Drawbacks of out-of-the-box Jira user interface

While Jira Software remains the most powerful platform for managing agile projects, several UI drawbacks affect the overall users:

  • Lack of visibility into sub-tasks & linked issues: important information confined in sub-tasks or linked issues is neither intuitive nor readily accessible and requires users to open each issue to get the full picture separately.

  • Inability to understand displayed information: the lack of table headers prevents business users from semantically understanding the displayed information. 

  • Inflexible configurations: out-of-the-box Jira does not allow users to customize the view for different Issue Types or Projects, thus stagnating the way teams organize their projects. 

While users typically adapt to the out-of-the-box Jira interface and the way information is displayed, their user experience and productivity can be significantly improved with Issue Matrix for Jira - an agile app for truly agile user experience.

Fine-tune your Agile practices with Issue Matrix

Issue Matrix for Jira is an application designed to enhance the experience of Jira users by enabling them to improve how Jira issues are visualized and making them easier to read. The tool allows users to see additional information and fields about each subtask or linked issue without opening it individually, thus saving teams many click-throughs and boosting their productivity. Teams will benefit from the various features designed to enable a genuinely agile experience, save time, boost productivity, and maximize their current Jira investment. 

Designed by Agile for Agile

Issue Matrix for Jira is designed by a team of agile product developers who have been using Jira Software for years and wanted to improve some of its UI shortcomings. The app, which is implemented as a custom field with a special rendition, is easily integrated with Jira’s Agile environment and allows users to enhance how their main Issue screen is visualized by adding additional columns and information. All of this data is available on a single screen, so users don’t need to open each field individually.

With Issue Matrix for Jira, Agile teams can easily overcome the limitations of their default Jira visualization - the tool is highly customizable and significantly improves the usability, structure, and content display of Sub-tasks, Linked Issues, and Issues in Epics. Let's take a deeper dive into the usability of sub-tasks in issues illustrated below:

Jira default visualization of sub-tasks in issues

  • The description of the panel Sub-tasks is generic and not specific to the process used in this project. 

  • A small, unidentifiable icon identifies the type of issues: Development, Quality Assurance, or Documentation task. 

  • There aren't table headers that explain the data in the column. (point 3 on the screenshot)

  • Custom fields cannot be added to this view

 

Visualization of sub-tasks in issues with Issue Matrix

  • User-friendly and customizable table name, which is the name of the Issue Matrix custom field.

  • Customizable column headers with additional information like sub-task summary, status, assignee, category, etc.

  • Custom column order per field (e.g., development tasks, documentation tasks, etc.)


Issue Matrix offers five highly customizable modes, which enable users to define which issues will be shown and what type of information will be displayed in the Issue View screen. The modes are as follows:

This flexibility in configuration customization will enable Agile teams to reconfigure how and what type of information is displayed based on the needs of the users. 

 

Improve your Scrum & Kanban: Enhancing Agile boards with Issue Matrix
The Issue Matrix table content can be configured for your Agile boards as well, which will significantly improve how users interact with the tasks on their Scrum and Kanban boards. Upon configuring this feature, users will be able to see the Issue Matrix table on each issue on their Agile board, thus eliminating the need for additional click-throughs.

Example of Issue Matrix tables in a Scrum board.

 

Example of Issue Matrix tables in a Kanban board.

Edit issues on the spot with Issue Matrix inline editing
Issue Matrix inline edit feature gives users the ability to quickly and easily edit issues an Issue Matrix field without navigating away from the current page, thus saving countless hours per week. Users can edit inline system fields, custom fields, and Service Desk fields, as well as different types of custom fields such as Select List, Story Points, and others.

Advanced JQL Contextual Linking
Another invaluable feature for agile teams is the advanced contextual linking, which provides users with the ability to compare issue fields with the values stored in the currently viewed issue. For example, users can quickly identify all issues in a given project that only share a common value, such as:

  • System field examples: Reporter, Assignee, Component, Fix version, Status, etc.

  • Custom field examples: Customer request type, Multi-group picker, Text field, etc.

This extension to the JQL syntax can be used in the Custom JQL mode and the JQL filter configuration option in the Sub-Tasks, Issue Links, and Epic modes. 

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