Summary Suggester

Owned by Mateusz Chmielewski
Last updated: 24/Oct/23 by Michał Mosiołek
2 min read

Once upon a time, there were a group of programmers. They shared the common thing - all of them shared the passion for coding. Unfortunately, they also shared the common issue - they always had difficulties with coming up with idea for a proper summary for their detailed Jira tasks. That state continued, until one of them came up with idea to create a new, perfect application, which would make their lifes at least a bit easier. And that’s how new, unexpected journey, began - and with that, our story how we’ve created one of our best Jira applications.

 

First decision was to abandon the limitations of UI Kit and built user interface by ourselfs, using Custom UI. It wasn’t an easy choice for us - UI Kit is an incredible set of components which would allow developer to built an app in very fast and safe way! However, due to multiple limitations, we had to give up on it. At first, we thought that we’ll be doomed - creating everything from scratch seemed like a unreachable goal. Luckily, we’ve been able to find Atlaskit - a setup of amazing React components, each one perfectly matched with Jira Cloud styling.

 

Choosing Custom UI was very important, yet only the first step in our journey. We had to choose Forge modules - or, to to put it differently - think about what and where exactly we’d like to show for our users. Finally, we chose three modules:

  1. Issue panel - to provide way for summary generations for already existing Jira issues

  2. UI modifications - to provide way for summary generations during Jira issue creation

  3. Admin page - to allow administrators for configuring application visibility in Jira issue creation view, per each project.

 

Another challenge that we had to deal with during our journey was to prepare a good prompt for AI model - something that would always give us simple, yet perfectly fitting for such issue - summary suggestions. It definitely was one of the biggest challenges for us. We had to deal with multiple moments of AI’s lack of cooperation, resulting in such responses as Sorry, I cannot help you with your problem or Please, provide more details - but finally, we reached our goal!

 

And that’s how our journey went so far. But don’t get us wrong - this story still continues! We have a lot of ideas in our minds how to improve our app:

  • new criteria for summary generation

  • new fields to generate summary for

  • … and more!

But that's another story for another time