Clear Path for Jira (Visual Dependency and Backlog Manager)

This is almost a brilliant app. The most useful, and the most frustrating feature at the moment is linking issues to be able to build the critical path faster than linking tickets in the Issues board. The point to point connecting of issues is great but every single one then refreshes the whole plan and takes 5-8 seconds to refresh each time, making multiple links very slow to do. If there was an edit/save function that let you do multiple links changes before saving to refresh that would save so much time. In addition, please please please can it include sub-tasks and assignee options?

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  Moser Labs

  Laura, Thank you for your review. Your feedback has contributed to a major change in Clear Path, deployed today in 3.6, that eliminates the automatic refresh and delay when creating/deleting links and ticket details.

  In 3.6, updates are made in place on the canvas (no change to your zoom level or canvas positioning). As you make edits, we continue to queue the edits and apply in Jira without the 5-8 second delay on the screen, making your visual backlog management experience faster.

  When you are ready to see how your changes affect the recommend implementation order of your tickets, click the new “Refresh Layout” button in the bottom right corner.

  In 3.10 we made also made assignee editable, but sub-task viewing is still under consideration in our roadmap. We hope the changes in this release were enough to elevate your rating from “almost brilliant” to “brilliant”. We appreciate the support.

This is a very helpful tool for consultants. It's rare to have a client fully buy into Agile and agree on a product being built with only a rough roadmap in mind, and no solid duration or budget. Clear Path can help with up-front estimating to determine a project's duration and effort, bridging the gap between “traditional” projects and Agile. Here's a recent, real-life example of how I used it. A client of ours needed to overhaul an enterprise-wide process and retool it with a modern, web-based application. While working our Discover and Design process we were able to better understand the business need, overall goal of the product, and the base features for an MVP. Armed with that knowledge we took a couple days to create several epics in Jira and filled them in with the appropriate user stories (~125 in all). After creating the user stories, we started to link them together (Blocked By) to build dependencies. With that quick exercise completed we were able to use Clear Path to visualize the story dependencies. If you miss one, Clear Path makes it easy to see stories that are "orphaned" with no dependencies. The cool thing is that the dependency can be added from the Clear Path UI with a simple click and drag. Once the dependencies are set, Clear Path shows potential story groupings for sprints which allowed us to estimate the total number of sprints needed for a full Scrum team (20 sprints in our case). Knowing that, we were able to quickly calculate the total budget for the project and present it to the client with confidence.