Synchronizing Jira projects and tickets provides an easy way to collaborate with external partners on projects or link multiple internal Jira instances together.
Why synchronize Jira projects, tickets and issues?
Jira is without a doubt one of the best project management tools for agile software development and beyond. It is used by countless companies and teams worldwide for remote collaboration. And thus enables process-oriented work in a digitalized manner. The great advantage is that it offers excellent configuration options and can often be adapted individually to the needs of different departments and teams with little effort.
Cross-company collaboration of developer teams
In many industries, external teams, service providers or freelancers are brought on board to support the handling of projects. Be it for reasons of additional expertise or because of a very special skill. Imagine you and your team are working together with external service providers on a larger project in Jira. Be it in software development, marketing or the digitalization of company processes. However, the "externals" usually need access to your internal systems and instance. However, this cannot be easily implemented due to compliance or security concerns. Additionally, different teams often work in their own systems, own workflows and methods. And then transfer the tickets or issues into the main system. This can ultimately cause serious problems in communication and project progress. During the transfer of information, important data is lost or updates are forgotten.
Collaboration between software development and support teams
In the software industry, the development of new features and the associated maintenance of the product are usually closely linked. However, service teams usually maintain multiple apps within their Jira service management instance. Furthermore, they usually work together with different development teams in one Jira software instance. Requests that are accepted, for example, as service requests or incidents by the service team in Jira Service Management must be analyzed and prepared for the upcoming development process for the respective development teams in the Jira software instance.
Therefore, it is necessary to intertwine the development process with the customer support process in technical terms as well. In this way, the cooperation between development and customer support must be simplified and the joint workflow made more efficient.
Scenario:
- Users report new bugs or make requests for new features via a service desk (e.g. Jira Service Management). These are processed as service requests or incident management and included or prioritized in the planning for the next update.
- Subsequently, these tickets are synchronized as Insights objects with Change Management. And processed by the developer team in a Jira software project.
The crucial question is how to export tickets from Jira Service Management and import them into the software project. Without losing valuable information and without the communication of both teams running professionally and efficiently? Usually, these tickets are summarized and passed on to the developers via email. But instead of manually emailing bug and feature reports to development, a Jira integration can automate this process. This allows support staff to create and sync issues, giving the development team instant access to the appropriate tickets. And that's without them having to sift through their emails first. This also means that the support agent has visibility into the status of each ticket, and can communicate a status change (e.g. Fixed) directly to the user.
Outsourcing of quality assurance for developers separated by multiple Jira instances
In large software or gaming companies, it is usually a best practice to have the Quality assurance (QA) of software projects. These companies very often work with a variety of different processes, priorities and specifications. As a result, these employees must constantly adapt new methods and be flexible in the way they work. Typically, QA staff do not have access to the developers' Jira instance. They can only access their own service management instance. In order to generate tasks for the developers, QA staff must have access to the developers' instance in order to manually create and maintain tickets in their Jira. This not only costs a lot of time and money in terms of license costs and duplicate data maintenance, but can also lead to problems updating the content in both instances.
Through a sync tool the QA employees can work in their own instance and synchronize only those tickets or projects that are important for their colleagues.
Scenario:
- QA employee finds bug
- The employee creates a Jira ticket
- QA Team Lead analyzes and prioritizes the tickets and synchronizes them with the developers' project
- The ticket is automatically created in the instance of the developers
- The developers edit the ticket and change the status to "Resolved".
- The status changes in the instance of the QA employee
In these cases, individual Jira projects, tickets, and any fields can be synchronized with an external instance. This ultimately promotes the collaboration of different stakeholders. This ultimately not only increases the efficiency of the processing time of tasks, but also improves the cross-company communication between the individual stakeholders. For this reason, a synchronization tool provides the option to collaborate on Jira projects or Jira tickets across organizations. In this way, valuable time can be saved and efficient project management can be operated in times of crisis (Corona).
Depending on the requirements for the synchronization of projects, tickets and fields etc., several solutions and apps come into question. In this case, we will take a closer look at the solution Jira Sync in. This comes completely without installation of a Plugins and offers much more Security compared to alternative solutions. The integration is configured so that it can be installed behind its own firewall and acts independently of the number of user instances. This means that with Jira Sync, costs are much lower and can be used as a microservice. Additionally, this solution is already available for all versions of Jira and Jira Service Management and is available for Cloud and Data Center.
How to synchronize workflows, tickets and Jira projects
1. Workflow mapping
It is not always possible to directly transfer entire company processes as workflows to a second instance. It is often sufficient to transfer only individual process steps (statuses) that actually exist in the second or external instance and can therefore be processed. This requires the adaptation of an individual workflow mapping.
Coordination of the workflow of both teams
In order for an efficient synchronization to succeed, it is essential to discuss beforehand how individual workflow process steps (statuses) look in the respective instances. Via workflow mapping, each individual process step from one instance is synchronized with the corresponding process step from the other instance. As soon as the status in the reference ticket changes, this change will automatically cause a status adjustment in the target ticket.
3. Synchronization of Jira ticket information
Now that you've agreed on workflows with your teams, it's time to figure out which fields in the ticket you want to sync. Do you only need simple information like ticket name, priority and description? Or should attachments, epics, comments, and custom fields also be transferred to the second instance or project? Together with Jira Sync it is also possible to customize the shared information at any time and tailor it to your needs.
4. User mapping
In addition to the usual information of the Jira tickets, the question arises whether individual editors or authors should also be "mapped" into a second instance. For example, the user from the first instance can have the name "John Doe", which will then be mapped to the name "John Doe (External)" in the second / external instance.
Alternatively, it is also possible to transfer multiple users from project A to one user from project B. This makes it easier to manage external service providers or teams and eliminates the need to add countless additional users to your Jira instance.
Synchronize Jira projects in real time
Of course, day-to-day business, software realeases, major updates or critical project phases can sometimes be stressful. Problems, bugs and adjustments have to be implemented as quickly as possible in such times. This in turn also means that updates to tickets must be transferred to the second instance or project as quickly as possible. With Jira Sync, this is a thing of the past and all tickets are synchronized in real time. This means that all teams involved always have the latest information available and can continue their work without interruptions.
Jira Sync - Experience seamless collaboration between internal and external IT teams using Jira
Synchronize Jira tickets, attachments, workflows, comments and more between multiple Jira instances. Without having to give your external partners extensive access to your Jira instance.
Summary
Depending on your requirements or use case, different information of the Jira Issues can be transferred to a second instance. Therefore, it is necessary to define which information is required. Additionally, it is necessary to analyze how the workflow of the involved teams looks like and then agree on a status quo. The more precisely the requirements are defined beforehand, the more efficiently a Jira Sync Tool can be configured.
