GitLab – Jira Integration Overview
In an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) ecosystem, the choice of systems and the collaboration between the cross-functional teams play a great role. While the choice of systems impacts the productivity of a team, the cross-functional collaboration brings in collective wisdom to take better decisions, faster.
Best-of-breed systems such as GitLab and Jira bring rich functionalities to the ecosystem and make the work of the development team easier and faster. When Jira and GitLab integrated within the ecosystem, it’s easier to keep a track of the commit trends and volume and therefore fulfill the compliance requirements. The dependency on manual communication to update the relevant stakeholders in different teams also considerably reduces.
How GitLab – Jira integration is beneficial for an enterprise
- Shorten the delivery lifecycle, streamline manual processes and accelerate team velocity
- Track commit volume, track commit trends and edits/changes to commit files in real time
- Enforce authentic commits to make sure each commit is happening against a scheduled and open workitem
How OpsHub Integration Manager integrates GitLab and Jira
OpsHub Integration Manager integrates Jira and GitLab bi-directionally. It ensures that all data is available to each user, in that user’s preferred system, with full context, in real-time. All the details related to a commit made against a work-item in Jira can be tracked from Jira itself. All the details related to a commit can be synced to Jira in various ways, following are a few examples:
- Synchronize every commit as a separate workitem linked to the workitem against which commit happens
- Synchronize commit details as comment to the workitem against which commit happens
- Change workitem field like ‘close a workitem’ when commit comments contain a pre-defined identifier
The development team using GitLab can also use advance features such as the Issue Board feature to streamline all issues coming in from Jira.
Popularly synchronized entities
Use Case: GitLab Integration with Jira
Problem statement: No control on backlogs getting committed – therefore, anyone can commit on a defect that is not even present in the active sprint.
Solution: If Jira and GitLab integrated using OpsHub Integration Manager, then OpsHub Integration Manager can put a check that user can only commit on a defect that is present in active sprint.
- A developer works on a ‘defect’ in Jira and runs a test case against it. The test case passes.
- The developer then commits against the ‘defect’ in GitLab.
- As the ‘defect’ against which the developer has committed is not in active sprint, when Jenkins runs a pre-scheduled test on it, the commit fails.
- The status of the commit synchronizes to Jira.
Benefits of integration for GitLab and Jira users
GitLab users
- Each commit can be traced back to its respective workitem at any given point in time from GitLab itself
- Enforced checkpoints ensure that no mandatory steps/checks are missed while making a commit – this leads to high success rate for commits
Jira users
- Complete traceability from Jira to source code in GitLab
- No manual intervention required to close workitems in Jira after a successful commit in GitLab
- Reduced dependency on manual communication to track the completion of a task