How to Integrate Jira Azure DevOps: The Complete Step-by-Step Guide (2023)

In today’s fragmented, multi-tool landscape, lack of collaboration and visibility can directly impact overall business performance and product delivery. However, these teams need more than just collaboration; they need powerful tools that can elevate their performance to the next level. Atlassian’s Jira and Microsoft’s Azure DevOps are two widely used work management tools – for organizing work and managing projects by software development teams across the globe.

Many teams use Jira and Azure DevOps, often within the same project or product development lifecycle to manage their work, track progress and monitor quality. Lack of cross functional data and cross-tool visibility can result in manual exchange of information, delayed sprints and missed information.

To understand better about Jira-Azure DevOps integration, the benefits of this integration and how you can carry out a seamless Jira-Azure DevOps integration using OpsHub Integration Manager read ahead.

Here’s a brief overview of what’s ahead:

• Understanding Jira and Azure DevOps
• Why enterprises go for a Jira Azure DevOps integration
• Selecting the right architecture for a Jira Azure DevOps integration
• Factors to consider before circling down on an integration solution
• Use case: Jira Azure DevOps integration – Step-by-step Jira Azure DevOps integration
• Measuring success: How to know if your Jira Azure DevOps sync is successful
• Get started with your Jira Azure DevOps integration

Understanding Jira and Azure DevOps

What is Jira?

Jira is a popular work management and issue tracking tool – widely used for its agile capabilities and advanced task management functions. Jira can be cloud-hosted or self-hosted and is highly customizable. It is popular among software development teams for its ability to track issues, gain visibility into deployment processes and supporting Agile methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban.

Over and above this, the Atlassian Marketplace offers a broad range of Jira customizations which provide an added layer of flexibility. Jira is best suited for teams that regularly work with different software and heavily rely on cross-team communication. The tool lets you assign tasks to different team members, track projects and handle a diverse range of use cases. Jira comes with the option of a 7-day free trial.

What is Azure DevOps?

Innovation giant Microsoft’s Azure DevOps is a system that supports a broad range of functionalities – from code versioning to testing and release management. The tool efficiently lets you keep a tab on your projects, track code and collaborate better for software development projects.

The platform is similar to Jira since it’s also quite popular with developers and comes in two versions – you can run it on cloud or host it on your own server. Azure DevOps covers the entire application lifecycle and enables DevOps capabilities. The tool is built on a multi-tier, scalable architecture and comes with a 30-day free trial. Overall, the SaaS platform offers a complete DevOps toolchain for software development and deployment, right from project management to build automation and version control.

Why Enterprises Go for a Jira Azure DevOps integration

The Azure DevOps – Jira integration brings several benefits to the software development process. Jira is widely used for agile project management, while Azure DevOps provides robust development and build/release management capabilities. By integrating these tools, enterprises can bridge the gap between project management and development activities. They can synchronize user stories, tasks, and issues between the two platforms, ensuring that development work aligns with project goals and priorities.

This integration enables efficient tracking of work across multiple teams and tools, increases visibility and transparency, and ensures that all stakeholders have access to the most up-to-date information. Ultimately, this can help teams deliver high-quality software products more quickly and with fewer errors.

Essentially, Jira and Azure DevOps integration automatically syncs your data between the two platforms – allowing teams to share issues, reduce manual, risk-prone tasks and view each stage of the project – from ideation to deployment and finally release.

Selecting the Right Architecture for a Jira Azure DevOps Integration

Having the right architecture for your Jira-Azure DevOps integration, or any integration for that matter is integral for the success of the endeavor. Integrations can be complex, and the choice of integration fabric can make or break your project.

To circle down on the right integration environment or platform for your business needs, consider these points:

Reliability

Can the integration platform run successfully without much monitoring and manual interference?

Scalability

Is the platform adept to cope with evolving business needs, changing technological landscapes and the enterprise’s long-term goals?

Consistency

Does the model ensure data consistency between the chosen systems without duplication or data loss?

Reliability

Can the integration platform run successfully without much monitoring and manual interference?

Scalability

Is the platform adept to cope with evolving business needs, changing technological landscapes and the enterprise’s long-term goals?

Consistency

Does the model ensure data consistency between the chosen systems without duplication or data loss?

Here are some more aspects which you must consider before investing in an integration solution

Ability to reconcile data

In a dynamic ecosystem where multiple concurrent changes are happening, any problems with data mapping or conflict resolution can lead to inconsistency between the systems involved. Therefore, the integration solution should have a defined method to detect out-of-sync entities and consistent rules to be applied for such entities.

The reconciliation rules should be so robust that there is no scope of duplication or data loss even when the data is being moved from a manual integration platform to an automatic integration platform.

Failure and conflict management

In case of any failure, the integration solution should allow the administrator to easily take corrective actions for all the entities in the failure queue. The administrator should easily group similar entities and take bulk actions to resolve it. It is also mandatory to provide configuration option for automatic retries of failures.

Security and compliance support

An enterprise-class integration solution can’t be considered reliable until it guarantees data security and secure user access. Therefore, the data/credentials stored within the integration solution should be in encrypted format and there should also be mechanisms in place to ensure secure user access.

Use case: Connecting Jira with Azure DevOps

The project management team uses Jira and development team uses Azure DevOps (ADO). Both teams collaborate manually to exchange data and insights. This leads to miscommunication multiple times.

When Jira and Azure DevOps are bi-directionally integrated using OpsHub Integration Manager, there is no scope for communication gaps or miscommunication between project management and development teams.

1. The project manager logs a ‘Feature’ in Jira. The feature synchronizes to ADO.
2. The development team breaks the ‘feature’ down into ‘user stories’ in ADO.
3. The development team completes the work and commits the code against on the ‘user stories’ and marks the ‘user stories’ as complete.
4. Subsequently, the status of ‘user stories’ also synchronizes to Jira.
5. In case the QA team reports a ‘Bug’, the development team logs the ‘bug’ in ADO, the ‘bug’ also synchronizes to Jira.
6. The development team fixed the bug and resolved the bug in ADO. Status resolved will be syncronized in Jira.
7. The project manager Identifies all user stories and related testing is done from Jira and closes the feature.
8. The same status will synchronized in ADO.
9. The project manager is therefore always up to date with the progress of the feature.

Step-by-step Jira ADO Integration Using OpsHub Integration Manager (OIM)

A few prerequisites to consider before we proceed on with the integration:

• OpsHub Integration Manager (OIM) should be installed on the machine before you proceed with the integrations.
• You should have OpsHub login credentials.
• Each system has its own set of prerequisites for successful integration. Refer to the system-specific prerequisites section from our OIM guide.

Step 1.1: Configure Jira system

• Once you log in, navigate to Configure Systems by clicking the plus sign at the top-right corner of the screen.

• Write Jira in the system type or select the Jira system from the system type list.

Step 1.2: Configure ADO system

• Now, as you configure the Jira System, select the ADO system from the system type list.

• Provide the necessary configuration details for ADO system, then click to save it.
  

Step 2: Mapping the Entities

Configuring the mapping after the systems are configured

• Drag and drop the systems in the Configure System screen, to initiate the mapping. After you put the system, click ’Proceed To Mapping’.
  

• It will redirect you to the Configure Mappings page automatically. Select your project and entity type here to proceed.
  

Here, you select the fields you want to map, check if you want to sync the comments and attachments, define the flow of information between the two systems, then click Create Mapping’ to save it.

Step 3: Integration Creation

• Once your mapping created, it would look like below, click the integrate button to proceed.

• You need to check the name and direction of the Synced Projects

• Now, you need to set up the polling time, and it will be based on your data at ADO.

• Now you can click the ‘Save’ button to save your integration. After saving the integration, you will see something like the below screen.

Step 4: Activating the Integration

• Click the expand button to see more information about the integration/migration. If you hover over the Integration control button, you will see different buttons like below. We will mainly use the Activate Integration and Inactivate Integration buttons. You can use the InActive/Active button alternatively to change the status of your migration.

Measuring Success: Ways to Calculate the Success of Your Jira Azure DevOps Sync

Now that you’ve reached the end of your Jira – Azure DevOps integration and it’s time to measure the results of the project, here are some critical factors to investigate –

• Time to market: Calculating the time to integration means assessing how much time it took for the integration project to be completed – from start to finish. You can measure this using the project start and end dates, completion dates of specific projects, and even tracking the durations of specific milestones during the project.

  Measuring the time taken to complete the integration project gives you a clear estimate of whether the project is on time, before or delayed.

• Cost savings: One of the most important reasons why people opt for an integration in the first place is to save up on the costs of regular maintenance, labor and training costs, and overall IT costs. Having a clear integration strategy before you get started with the project will help you understand how much you saved before and after the integration, and what were the financial benefits of the integration.
• Data quality: Data is the key denominator in the overall success of your integration project. To measure the data quality before and after the completion of the integration – you can assess it using two main metrics – data accuracy and data completeness.

  Data accuracy is the measure of data which is accurate and error-free. Data completeness checks whether the data is consistent in all systems or not and inclusive of all relevant information. Additionally, tracking the specific business processes affected by the integration and data governance are also important success metrics.

• Customer satisfaction: Happy, satisfied customers are at the heart of all strategic business endeavors. To measure the measure of customer satisfaction and customer retention, a good way to get started would be by using customer surveys, gathering customer feedback and regularly calculating your customer retention rates.
• Security and compliance: Post the completion of the integration project, it’s critical to measure if the project is in line with the applicable security regulations and compliance standards. Security and compliance metrics can be measured by conducting regular audits and inspections, through incident reports and by calculating the effectiveness of any recent employee training programs.

Conclusion

To sum up, both Jira and Azure DevOps come with the promise of a powerful, collaboration-first integration. Moreover, if you’re spearheading innovation teams that strive to deliver high quality releases and reduce your time-to-market, an integration like this only brings you one step closer to achieve that goal.

Authors

Muskaan Pathak works as a Content and SEO Strategist at OpsHub. Her interests include devising content marketing strategies for SaaS enterprises, brand strategy and the convergence of emerging tech with design and communication.

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Parth Shah heads the Professional Services team at OpsHub. With over 16 years of experience in the field of data orchestration, he specializes in driving cutting-edge solutions for complex use cases, and inspiring teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences across the board.