Whiteboard for Jira

If you use Jira for product management or project management, you’ve probably done at least one of these before:

• Shared your screen during a meeting so that other people can see you move things around in Jira
• Exported Jira issues into a spreadsheet so that you can work with them in a more flexible way
• Printed out Jira issues and stuck them on a wall or put them on a table to prioritize them

Qualdesk is a whiteboard designed for Jira. It lets you:

1. Work with Jira bugs, stories, tasks and epics on a 2D whiteboard
2. Collaborate in realtime with people on your team, with live cursors and live typing
3. Take action on Jira issues directly from the whiteboard
4. Run planning poker sessions and vote on estimates
5. Transform stickies into Jira issues
6. Create hotspots to automate Jira actions

Qualdesk supports both classic and next gen / team managed projects on Jira Cloud. Qualdesk will support Jira Server in the future.

1 Work with Jira bugs, stories, tasks and epics on a 2D whiteboard

Qualdesk makes it easy to work in a more flexible way with your content from Jira, making it easier to:

• Do sprint planning visually
• Arrange issues into groups or clusters
• Add labels, annotations and images

Getting Jira issues on to a Qualdesk board is easy. You can browse and search in the sidebar, and then simply drag and drop the issues or epics you want on to the board.

2 Collaborate in realtime with people on your team

No more screensharing Jira. With Qualdesk you get:

• Live multiplayer cursors: see what your team members are pointing at, and run interactive planning sessions and discussions
• Live typing: just like in Google Docs, you can see your team members type as they edit issue titles

3 Take action on Jira issues directly from the whiteboard

With the Jira integration in Qualdesk you can:

• Update status (to do, in progress, done, and any of your custom issue status types)
• Assign people
• Add parent epics
• Move to / from sprints or the backlog in Scrum projects

You can work with individual issues, or update multiple issues at once. Simply select them on the board and use the mini-sidebar or right click to make changes.

4 Run planning poker sessions and vote on estimates

Qualdesk makes it easy to vote on estimates as a team. It currently supports Fibbonaci sequence estimates, and will support t-shirt size estimates in the future.

There are three stages:

1. Switch to estimation mode and vote on each story to be estimated. While this is happening, you can only see your own estimates, and not estimates of your other team members. You can do this synchronously or asynchronously, and use the ready button to show when you’re finished.

2. Once everyone has voted, switch to resolve estimates. You can now see the votes cast, and who voted for what. As a team, discuss and agree estimates and click to resolve them.

3. Sync the resolved estimates with Jira – no need to write them up manually.

5 Transform stickies into Jira issues

With a couple of clicks, you can turn a sticky note or card on a Qualdesk board into a Jira issue. This is ideal for:

• Writing up potential bugs and agreeing as a team which ones should go into Jira
• Turning follow-up actions from retrospectives into tasks in Jira
• Drafting user stories for a new feature on a whiteboard and converting them into stories in Jira

As with all other Jira actions, you can do this one sticky or card at a time, or in bulk by selecting multiple items.

You can also use this feature to convert Trello cards to Jira issues, convert Linear issues to Jira issues and to convert rows in Google Sheets to Jira issues.

6 Create hotspots to automate Jira actions

You can add actions to groups in Qualdesk to automate Jira updates. Here’s how it works:

1. Press G or select the Draw Group tool in the toolbar
2. Draw a group
3. Click Add an action and choose Jira actions

Using this, you can create a hotspot on the board to:

• Set sprint: ideal for sprint planning or backlog grooming
• Set parent: ideal for epic-level planning
• Convert to Jira: ideal for story writing
• Change issue status: create Kanban and other workflow boards in Qualdesk
• Assign issues: manage your team’s tasks

Every item you drag into the group will have the action applied. As with all other Jira actions, you can do this one at a time or in bulk.

And much more

We publish release notes for every new feature, and ship new features 2-3 times every sprint. We respond to feature requests within 24 hours, and have a generous free plan. Our goal is to be the most powerful collaboration tool for Jira in the world.