Project Canvas

A new interface for more efficient organization of Product Backlog Items (PBIs) in software projects at MaibornWolff, that addresses the issues with the currently used project management tool: Atlassian Jira.

Better organise, prioritise, and visualise PBIs.
More intuitive and flexible tool for managing software projects
Custom features and improved usability at a lower cost

Team

Alexander Hartmann

alexander@kta-hartmann.de

Quality Assurance

Enrico Chies

enrico.chies@stud.tu-darmstadt.de

Communicator

Ihsen Bouallegue

bouallegueihsen@gmail.com

Team Leader

Oussema Masmoudi

gib.masmoudi@gmail.com

Ressource Manager

Christian Huetter

ch-huetter@gmx.de

Scrum Master

Client

MailbornWolff GmbH

MaibornWolff creates excellent, sophisticated and individual software solutions for customers and their users. Their specialists advise, code and test in comprehensive digitization projects.
As an IT service provider with over 30 years of tech experience, they take overall responsibility, complex issues and ambitious projects drive them. With their extensive know-how they strive to bring any project to fruition.

Problem

JIRAs limitations in usability and cost

Lack of support for visual representation of PBIs where Jira does not provide the ability to represent PBIs in a way that is easy for team members to understand.
High cost for additional features because Jira adopts the Pay-per-use model. This means that depending on how many features are used or how often a particular feature is used, the cost can increase. Additionally, as a team grows and more users require the tools capabilities, the cost of additional user licenses will increase.

Description

Overview

The aim of this project is to develop a new interface for organising Product Backlog Items (PBIs) for software projects at MaibornWolff. It is an open-source project although it is currently planned that only MaibornWolff will use it. Furthermore, MaibornWolff will continue to develop custom features for this software, after the project is finished.

This interface will address the issues with the currently used project management tool, Atlassian Jira, by providing custom features and improved usability at a lower cost.

The current project management tool, Atlassian Jira, has limitations in terms of usability and cost.
These limitations make it difficult to prioritise and visualise PBIs, and lack flexibility in managing software projects.
These issues affect the Scrum teams at MaibornWolff and their customers, potentially reducing productivity and satisfaction.

The new interface will be developed in the form of a desktop application that communicates with Jira using its API, allowing the data to remain on the customers' servers and avoiding compatibility and privacy issues. This will enable the Scrum team to better organise, prioritise, and visualise PBIs, and will provide a more intuitive and flexible tool for managing software projects in the current remote-first organisational strategy. In the end, making it possible to better serve the needs of the customer and deliver high-quality software products in a timely and cost-effective manner. Developing a new interface will also allow our client to avoid using other project management tools like Azure DevOps. This is important because MaibornWolffs customers already pay significant licensing fees to Atlassian Jira, and using another tool could raise compatibility and privacy issues. By keeping the data on the customers servers and using Jiras API, we can provide custom features without incurring additional costs or violating data protection laws, making it a more practical and feasible solution for MaibornWolff and its customers.

Features

Login

We support Login Options for both Jira Cloud and Jira Server. For Jira Cloud users we provide the Oauth2 service thus assuring a safe connection with the JIRA Api. For Jira Server users we provide an authentication using the URL of the server, the username and the password.

Project View

In Project View we present a list of the created Projects with the corresponding informations to each project. It is possible to sort the projects by any field and search for a specific Project using the Search function. Selecting a specific project redirects the user to the corresponding backlog view page.

Backlog View

In Backlog View the PBIs are displayed in the order in which they are displayed in Jira. To the right, you can see a list of the current or future sprints that Jira has. You can click on a PBI and see its details. The fields displayed in the backlog and detail views are editable. The PBIs can be assigned to the single sprints or to the backlog and their priority can be changed, all via Drag & Drop.

Hill Chart

It would be nice to be able to intuitively and visually tell how far the excution of an issue has progressed. Such an overview is particularly useful for long-term PBIs (three days or more) in order to be able to identify difficult tickets more quickly. This is addressed in the Hill Chart feature, where we can use drag and drop to visualise whether we are still “climbing the mountain” or whether we already know how to implement everything and we “just have to roll down the hill

Story Map

The Story Map feature shows us which step in the user workflow a PBI improves and when this PBI will be done (sprint or release). There is technical context for the purpose of a PBI and a roadmap of when it will be done