Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Introduction to Smartwatch

If you have worked with JIRA you probably have used the watch function. JIRA allows you to watch issues. If you do you will get emails when there are changes made to the issue.

The mails are good: you can see what has happend, and you get a link to open the issue. But you will probably get a lot of them, at least if you are in an organisation where many users work on the same issue. And will some of them will give you valuable information, others will be pretty uninteresting, or even spam.

Goal

So the main goal of Smartwatch for JIRA is to solve this. Smartwatch for JIRA allows you to get notified only for changes you care about. You will get rid of at least some of the spam in your mailbox. Another effect is that since you can set up watches that only trigger for example when an issue is Ready, you can use it also for users that don't actually work on an issue, but are interested in knowing when you have solved it.

Basic assumptions

The design of Smartwatch for JIRA is based on a few assumptions:
  • most users are not interested in all changes, but rather in a subset. While changes in some fields might be very interesting, changes in others are not.
  • different users are interested on different changes, so they should be able to set different watches on the same issue. This might be based on their roles, or might be just personal preferences.
  • some issues are more interesting for a user than others. While you might be interested in being notified for almost everything on the issues you are working on, you will probably want only the most important updates for others

Issue view

The key functionality of Smartwatch is in the little table Smartwatch adds to the issue page:

smartwatch issue gadget
As you can see there are three watches for the current issue. Erik, the logged in user (logged in user is always displayed first) watches changes in the content (description, comments etc), admin wants to know when status changes, and Axel just wants to know when the issue is ready. More on this in the users guide.

Watches can be created by hand, simply by entering them in the issue page, or automatically. Users can set up in their profile that they want watches automatically created for them. Any way you can remove or modify any watch in the issue page.

Smartwatch uses watch rules, to define what changes you should be notified about. You get a set of rules set up for you automatically when you install the plugin, but you can customize those, add your own rules or deactivate the predefined ones. Check out the setup guide.



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