I liked to think that Jira has a pretty excellent UI. It’s what originally attracted me to the product when I purchased it for the first time (back when I was a customer instead of an employee). But there are always places where things could be improved, as Leonard Lin showed us this week.
He pointed out that it is somewhat inconvenient to log work against a issue. Logging work is not tied to the “start/stop progress” action or the “close issue” action, two places where it would be natural to record the amount of time you’ve worked.
Getting developers to actually keep up with time spent is hard enough (I know I never did). And this just throws another roadblock in their way.
So Leonard, rather than waiting around for us to change things, changed it himself. Though the magic of Greasemonkey, Leonard added worklog fields to the stop/progress action and the close issue action with the Jira Greasemonkey Worklog Helpers.
You can also check out this screencast of his additions. Now that’s good documentation.
Greasemonkey is a wonderful invention. If you’ve made any other additions to Jira or Confluence with Greasemonkey, we’d love to see them. Or if there are things that we could change to make this kind of hacking easier for you in the future, let us know.
