Why
Why AJIR
Why do we think AJIR is better ? What problems did we want to solve ? What questions do we want to answer with AJIR ?
The idea of AJIR came out of discomfort using current tools.
Apparently, I am not alone: https://ifuckinghatejira.com/
Problems & questions
The core problems/questions that I have are the following:
- How can each hierarchical level get a relevant view of the products state. What about external stakeholders and final clients ?
- What are the dependencies between products and tasks (how to find them easily)
- Documentation is a mess; I don’t easily find the information I need. The documentation structure is not aligned with my products/features hierarchy (e.g. Jira + Confluence usage)
- How can I retrieve internal knowledge that is not official documentation (e.g. why did we take this decision to NOT do something ?)
- How to prioritize products/features building ?
- How long will it take (in total, so far, remaining) ?
- We spend to much time planning, not enough actually building.
- Time sheeting is boring and a nightmare.
- What are my bugs, user feedbacks, help requests (basically everything that is coming back to me/the company from the products)
AJIR's answers
I wanted AJIR to solve these problems and get answers to these questions while remaining the leanest possible.
I want to constantly keep in mind that using a product management tool is not 'the work', building products actually is !
So AJIR has all the basic features to answer those questions and solve those problems:
- A hierarchical structure of products and features, that an owner can manage individually but is giving anyone a structured view of the products hierarchy at the same time.
- A simple mechanism to keep track of dependencies and retrieve them in both directions (is used by, uses) and at each hierarchical level.
- A browsable and self-organizing documentation that aggregates all individual product/features docs in the exact same hierarchical structure.
- A global search allowing to retrieve products/features/tasks/users and company knowledge/documentation.
- Automatic time sheeting through tasks, allowing to aggregate at different levels
- An API allowing to send bugs, user feedbacks from the products code to the AJIR app
- Bonus: integration to Github to keep track of commits linked to Tasks/Products/Features. Different methods are available, from direct objects mentions in commit messages to automatic remote repo branch creation when a Task is created.
Lionel - April 3, 2023