Our experience bringing our Jira Integration to Stride
Our path to developing our Jira integration for Stride started on a Friday afternoon back in March. We were wrapping up our week and planning to take some much needed R&R when we received a message via Intercom.
It went like this…
Turquoise Camel from Phoenix: Real person here or bot?
Us: Real, what’s up?
Turquoise Camel from Phoenix: Hi, I am from the partnership team at Atlassian and love what you guys are doing with Jira. Would like to talk about how it could work with Stride. Are you the right person?
Us: Yes..sounds great, lets jump on a call.
We got on the call and found a real person who was actually from Atlassian on the other end of the line.
Needless to say we wondered why Atlassian would be interested in having us develop for Stride. We learned that in house initiatives were underway but primarily focused on Jira Cloud customers. There was an opportunity to provide a best in class solution for all Jira customers — regardless of Server or Cloud instance.
Furthermore, we found out that Atlassian hosts developer conferences called App Week and there was an upcoming App week in Key Largo, FL and we would be invited to participate.
Decision Point
Suddenly all of our plans for Scrum — our agile automation product were up in the air.
Should we turn down an invitation from Atlassian and build on our own or switch focus and build for Stride?
After weighing our options we decided to spend “a few weeks” building for Stride (3 months ago). We had planned to expand to other chat programs anyway and the idea of Florida in March sounded pretty nice.
App Week Key Largo
We had a few weeks before App Week so a quick MVP seemed like the best way to show the team how our deep integration with Jira for Slack would helps us quickly develop a solution for Stride. Armed with our MVP the team went to Florida not knowing what to expect.
What we found was way better than we imagined.
- The Atlassian teams representing all products and teams were extremely helpful and encouraging
- A significant focus for attendees had been placed on small teams. Many 1–2 person companies like us were represented.
- It was clear that Atlassian believed in its development partners and was making investment into building the community.
- Stride offered us significant capabilities not available in our existing solutions
- Atlassian had re-thought everything from the ground up for Stride. This was a micro-services based platform ready to scale.
- The Stride team were great people to know and believed we had a real opportunity if we could deliver a killer solution.
What made Stride different
Developing for Stride proved to be both fun and interesting. The platform is growing quickly and new features we could utilize were being released and improved.
The key difference was the flexibility Stride provided to really make Jira Integration+ shine.
- We had full control of our dialogs, sidebars and configuration screens.
- Atlaskit provided many ready made UI components for React
- Atlassian Document Format (ADF) was powerful though initially appeared complicated to use.
- Stride offered a great looking product that we enjoyed using internally
The ability to control the user interface elements allowed us to take our solution beyond what we imagined. We could now better solve for our most common use cases and provide better solutions for customers.
We love how Jira Integration+ for Stride turned out for the first version. The ability to show all the fields we wanted from Jira enhanced the usability of our solution and we think customers are going to love the experience.
It was also fun to find a use for the glances and sidebar in Stride. We now had a persistent place to show users the most important information. In our case we added a few tabs in our sidebar.
Our Sidebar
- Trending — shows the Jira issues users are discussing in the room
- My Issues — shows the user their assigned issues for the project connected to the room
What comes next?
With our initial version released and available in the Atlassian Marketplace we are starting to work with the Atlassian partners to help educate the market on our offering and get further feedback from customers.
There are already a few roadmap items and we know there will be some bugs to squash along the way so we will keep working to make our solution for Stride better for our customers. Stride itself will be also getting new capabilities and we will look to take advantage of them as they are released. We are also turning focus back to Scrum and hope to release an MVP version soon, if interested in Scrum please feel free to join our beta list.
If you want to give our solution for Stride a try feel free to check out our website and install our bot for free trial.
3 months after Turquoise Camel from Phoenix entered our lives we certainly know more about Atlassian Stride and it will be very interesting to see how the team chat space plays out. For many Atlassian customers a tightly integrated stack will likely make sense and the features of Stride already make a compelling case and certainly stand up to what we have seen from the others.
