Node Time

Inspiration

Whenever I'm breaking down projects, I'm always looking to do one thing: Break things down into small pieces, and hopefully pieces that can be worked on in parallel. But with larger, more complex epics, a lot of the pieces depend on each other. And its difficult to keep all this information in your head as you try to determine how to structure the project, or how to determine what's available right now, or how to determine which issue one should complete to unlock as many other issues as possible.

What it does

Node Time provides a view that displays your epics' issues as a dependency node graph. This makes it easy to discover what issues are currently available to make progress on, which issues would help most unlock other issues to allow for more parallel work, and also provides a visual friendly view to track progress on your epic.

How I built it

The app is built using Atlassian's Forge framework and packages.

Challenges I ran into

Initially this was started using UI Kit, but unfortunately that did not allow for custom components/css. Switching to Custom UI allowed these, but there was no way to then use the UI Kit components! So creating a look and feel that matched Jira's was frustrating.

What's next for Node Time

Important features to finalize functionality:

Improve node layout algorithm to group child elements together.
Add a progress bar to each "locked" issue that unlocks once all the dependencies are completed
Allow for direct manipulation of the node graph. Dragging edges between nodes should modify the issues to create the dependency.
Allow for different slices other than epics. Having a JQL search box to display any subset of your issues.