Jira isn't working for our designers

Hey everyone, brand new to the community. Heard about Shotgun a while back, but hadn’t looked into it until now. I’m the COO at a game development studio. We currently use Jira to track all of our development work. I’ve heard rumbling from our designers that Jira isn’t the best solution.

Has anyone transitioned to using both Jira & ShotGrid? I see that there’s a Jira Bridge. That seems useful. I’m curious about how well they work together. I don’t want to plan out my work in both applications, but understand that ShotGrid is far more powerful for visual development. Even our game developers use Unity, so would they use ShotGrid as well? Have people switched completely from Jira to ShotGrid?

Any information about use cases would be amazing.
Thank you very much!

Hi John,
I’m setting up sg-jira-bridge for a client at the moment.
The default implementation is quite limited and has some unsupported features (eg handling of task/issue/entity deletions, bi-directional notes. see Known Issues & Compatibility Notes — sg-jira-bridge v0.3.1 documentation (shotgridsoftware.com)).
What kind of entiities (and their hierarchies) are you wanting to sync?
What kind of workflows do you want it to support?

Good morning Patrick! Thanks for the reply. I don’t fully understand the entire ShotGrid workflow just yet, only what I’ve seen in the 5min overview video.

Currently we use Jira to create design tickets and track our time against those tickets. We used to store the finished assets in Jira, but we’re recently switched over to using Miro for all designs. Miro isn’t designed as an asset repository software, so it isn’t ideal. We end up stacking versions of images on top of each other for historical purposes.

I see that ShotGrid can do time tracking as well. I’d like all of our time tracking to be in one place, ideally Jira because that’s what the rest of the development team uses. So, maybe a way to create tickets in ShotGrid and have them sync over to Jira? Then we can update times in Jira while keeping all the wonderful functionality of version control in ShotGrid.

We have two main designer types, 2D artists working in Photoshop and then we have game designers working in Unity. I see that there’s an integration for ShotGrid and Unity as well but still don’t understand the value it provides.

Hope this helps give you a better idea of our workflow.

Hi John.

I thought I could add to this. JIRA and Shotgrid have some overlapping concepts in the way tickets/tasks(JIRA/Shotgrid) are structured. But Patrick is correct. The default is very “bare bones” and getting it to work will require moderate to considerable development time depending on your implementation. It’s also very Shotgrid centric on creation. So, by default, you’d have to create tasks in Shotgrid first to get them to be spawned in JIRA. It doesn’t work the other way around (by default).

I can’t speak too much to Time Tracking…we are used to JIRA as well. But I can say that it’s not done well in JIRA either. I’ve had producers testing the GANTT chart in JIRA and found it lacking. But we still are dealing with a group that is more familiar with JIRA.

Shotgrid in Unity would be a Shotgrid Toolkit integration. Shotgrid has integrations that are formally supported or other ones that are supported by other parties or the community. For example, Epic maintains it’s Shotgrid Toolkit Integration. The benefit of the integration is that a unified form of the Shotgrid interface is inside the application itself. And users can access a lot of relevant data without having to bounce back and forth. It also allows a powerful framework to guide and enforce where files are saved and what they are named. The result is that a user or producer doesn’t have to curate some art or dev task and then go manually update the tracking software. From Unity itself, a dev could see a list of tasks assigned to them, start and complete work, save locally, publish to a repository, and have their work marked as ready for review and sent to the art director AND updated in the Shotgrid database where everyone else (stakeholder or not) can see the most up to date information. The user would not have to leave Unity to do this.

Hope this helps.

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Thank you so much for your reply and I apologize for the delay.
This helps a lot with a better understanding of the default workflow and how we could use it with Jira and Unity.

I may have to speak with a sales engineer to better understand the benefits for our team members using Unity every day.