Author bio:
Mark Schultz is Vice President of Sales at OpsHub. He has extensive experience in aligning with Customers and Partners to achieve business objectives. Mark has significant expertise in helping technology-led companies scale up their Agile and DevOps practice using the appropriate modernization and tool federation solutions.
Hybrid and cross-domain teams today use a variety of best-in-class tools that are designed to make their work easier, automated and intuitive. For example, the popular issue and work management tool from Atlassian, Jira is widely used by agile teams for its in-built support for the iterative paradigm of development and testing. In addition, Jira’s robust workflow mapping and issue-tracking capabilities make it the preferred choice across various industries globally.
However, stakeholders such as product managers, QA leads, or business analysts often use specialized off-the-shelf solutions that serve their needs better. This leads to a fragmented tool ecosystem impacting visibility, collaboration, productivity, traceability, and data integrity across the value chain. How can teams continue to fully leverage the flexibility and benefits of Jira while continuing to seamlessly collaborate with other members of the team using different tools?
Here are some examples of how you can extend Jira’s capabilities by integrating it with some of the most requested DevOps and Agile tools to foster collaboration, transparency, and traceability throughout the federated value chain.
Integrating Jira with Requirements Management Tools
How integrating Jira and requirements management tools benefits your teams:
- Complete requirements traceability throughout the development lifecycle
- No manual dependency for synchronizing data or checking status
- Full context of business requirements and real-time updates of changing priorities
- Accelerated speed of delivery
Find out more about Jira – Windchill RV&S integration
Watch this video to see how Jira integrates seamlessly with Jama Connect
Integrating Jira with ITSM and CRM tools
Integrating Jira and ServiceNow enables full transparency and traceability between customer service and development teams to resolve high priority requests faster and communicate effectively in real-time.
How integrating Jira and ServiceNow improves customer experience:
- Access to real-time and historical data on customer issues and priorities
- Communication on work items from native systems
- Prompt action on the most critical issues
- Easy classification and transfer of customer tickets into Jira
Watch how ServiceNow integrates with Jira in this video
Integrating Jira with other ALM tools
In many organizations, each development team uses a different set of best of breed tools for issue tracking and work execution. As a result, the need for integration becomes more prominent.
For instance, a team developing a microservice using a .NET environment may choose to use Azure DevOps Services for managing its work while the other development teams work with Jira. In addition, cross-functional dependencies require visibility into the data distributed across tools and projects.
Benefits of Jira integration with Azure DevOps Server (TFS) and Azure DevOps Services (VSTS):
- Traceability and transparency throughout the ALM toolchain
- Real-time status update and access to development plans and progress
- Clarity into quality parameters and metrics from within Jira
- No manual dependencies for making business decisions
Integrating Jira with Quality Management and Verification tools
Integrating Jira software with test management tools facilitates the bidirectional flow of artifacts between development and testing teams. Teams working in Jira and a quality management tool such as Micro Focus ALM or qTest Manager, or TestRail often need to share information across tools.
Cross-functional collaboration can be expensive, time-consuming, and even error-prone if carried out manually. Setting up bidirectional integration between Jira and Micro Focus ALM (Also known as Micro Focus ALM / QC and Micro Focus ALM Octane) or any other quality management tool helps development and quality assurance teams collaborate effortlessly with data synced into their preferred system in real-time.
Integrate Jira and Micro Focus ALM to empower your teams:
- Real-time updates on the status of User Story, delivery timelines and risks associated with a release candidate
- Access to QA plans and bugs in real-time
- Insights into the test processes, test plans and test suite
- Automated mapping of stories to requirements, defects to defects, iterations to releases across Jira and Micro Focus ALM
- Improved collaboration between development and QA teams
The cross-team visibility created by integrating Jira with quality management tools ensures that the product’s planning, development, and quality checks are thorough.
To understand the flow of information between Jira and Cadence vManager, watch this video
Similarly, you can enhance cross-functional traceability and ensure complete functional verification by integrating Jira with a verification tool such as Cadence vManager. Verification teams leveraging a tool like Cadence vManager can sync the latest requirement changes from Jira. Verification tests are mapped to Jira, and verification engineers run analysis and compute grade results for a session. The bi-directional sync improves collaboration, quality assurance, and management of System on Chip verification.
Integrating Jira with Value Stream Management tools
Enhance your development speed with greater visibility, collaboration and insights across the tool chain. Integrating Jira with the rest of your value stream helps product owners, portfolio managers and developers to work effectively on the capabilities, stories and epics to prioritize.
Benefits of integrating Jira with Jira Align, Rally or Agility
- Access to user stories and updates from within Jira
- Traceability for user stories across teams
- Full context of customer requirements and priorities
- Accurate decomposition of capabilities into Epics
- Visibility into real-time status updates and transparency into the agile workflow
Selection criteria for an integration solution
What type of integration best practice you must follow and how to select the ideal solution to integrate Jira with the rest of your toolchain?
- Seamless, real-time and bi-directional integration
- Ability to integrate projects and entities with full context and history
- Failure management and conflict resolution
- Complete transaction history
- Full traceability across systems with no data leakage
- Deployment flexibility (Cloud or On-Premise)
Consolidating and integrating your Atlassian ecosystem
Users of Jira often prefer to work within the Atlassian ecosystem, leveraging either multiple instances of Jira or products such as Jira Align and Jira Service Management. Digital transformation demands greater visibility and collaboration between multiple teams using different Jira instances or Atlassian tools. Whether it is Jira cloud migration, consolidating disparate Jira instances or integrating Jira with other Atlassian tools or plugins, a robust integration/migration approach is required to ensure high-data fidelity and zero downtime in these consolidation efforts. Learn how you can migrate to Jira, Jira Service Management or Jira Align from other ALM tools with full fidelity and zero downtime.
Find out more about other popular Jira integrations
Conclusion
Businesses today work in a heterogeneous landscape that demands transparency and visibility across their value chain. As a result, enterprises can use best-of-breed tools and enable teams to have a unified experience with a connected ecosystem that integrates data from multiple systems and makes it available to users in their preferred system.
OpsHub Integration Manager can synchronize data seamlessly between 50+ tools in the ALM ecosystem with a three-step setup and guaranteed data consistency.
To find out more about integrating Jira with your preferred tool, reach out to our experts for a complimentary consultation session.
Author bio:
Mark Schultz is Vice President of Sales at OpsHub. He has extensive experience in aligning with Customers and Partners to achieve business objectives. Mark has significant expertise in helping technology-led companies scale up their Agile and DevOps practice using the appropriate modernization and tool federation solutions.
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