Jira Synchronize Projects

Synchronize Jira projects between multiple Jira instances

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. 

Jira Simple Workflow
Simple Jira Workflow
Jira Support & Service Workflow
Support & Service Workflow

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. 

Jira Ticket Synchronization
Jira Ticket Synchronization

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. 

Jira Sync User Mapping

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

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.

Project Management Tools

Project management tools in comparison: Jira vs. Asana vs. Monday

There are countless project management tools on the market. It can be a real challenge to make the right choice. After all, we all want to be able to manage and process our projects and tasks as simply and clearly documented as possible. Where many companies still work with Excel sheets and other manual tools, today's tools offer the one unbeatable advantage: automation of your task management, easiest collaboration with your team and transparency towards all involved stakeholders.

While server-side or on-premises solutions used to be in the foreground, today's tools mostly run in the cloud and are offered as SaaS products. Expensive server rooms and hardware are thus a thing of the past. Many of these tools already offer the advantage for small teams that they are often offered free of charge in their basic function. Teams can simply register and get started. It only becomes problematic when it comes to security issues with cloud solutions. 

The following questions arise more and more frequently:

  • Can I store my data in the cloud without further ado?
  • Does only my organization have access to my corporate data?
  • Are the tools data protection compliant (DSGVO, GDPR)?
  • Where is my data stored?
  • How expensive are cloud project management tools for larger teams?
  • Can I implement my workflows in these tools?

In 2021, these questions can often be answered easily and satisfactorily. So there is usually nothing standing in the way of migrating your project management.

Modern project management tools do not have to be expensive

In project management, you work on new tasks every day. As a project manager, you need to keep track of your resources, document project progress, manage responsibilities, organize your team and set priorities. The functional scope should therefore already contain the most important aspects, such as planning, task management, collaboration of your teams, time tracking, budget and resource management and reporting. 

The question you end up asking yourself is "what tool is best for this". 

Of course, the price of the project management tool also plays a major role.

Jira SoftwareAsana or Monday.com are in their basic function and for small teams of about 10 people inexpensive or even free and can be easily integrated into your existing system. Extensive enterprise solutions, on the other hand, can quickly blow up your budget. 

Below we have taken a closer look at three of the most popular project management tools.

Jira Software from Atlassian

Jira is great as a project management tool. It is currently available as Cloud version usable with external hosting (e.g. AWS or Azure) or natively on Atlassian. Both versions have a similar range of functions, although a large number of extensions (plugins) are currently (as of March 2021) only available for the Data Center version.

However, the roadmap for Jira for the coming years already foresees that all Atlassian partners make their plugins ready for the cloud. Currently, there are already thousands of integrations and plugins that extend the functionality of Jira.

Jira Software for Cloud (Native) provides you with all the common features you already know from your previous project management. 

Features of Jira:

  • Kanban boardsWork completely visually and keep a complete overview of the project progress, tasks and complete your project quickly and efficiently.
  • Scrum BoardsYou use agile working methods like Scrum? Focus on your software development with customizable Scrum boards
  • Roadmaps: Keep track of your project and share your insights with stakeholders and coordinate project planning with your teams' tasks.
  • Agile reporting: Create personalized reports with real-time information in just a few clicks.
  • Process automationWith Jira you can easily automate and digitize your most common business processes (e.g. application processes, ordering processes).
  • Drag-and-Drop: Easily change the status of your tasks by dragging and dropping them into Kanban boards.
  • IntegrationsDo you use other SaaS tools besides Jira, such as HubSpot, Mailchimp, Slack, Google Drive or Git? You can find thousands of cool tools in the Atlassian Marketplace
  • Custom Code: Have special requirements in your project management tool, process digitization or task management? You can also extend Jira with your own code and customize it to your needs.

In Jira, you mainly work with assigned tasks. These are grouped together in one place, along with summary, comments, attachments, priority, and status. This makes it straightforward to work on tasks. The cool thing is that whenever a factor of a task changes or you get a new task assigned, you get a notification. Jira is a tool that not only simplifies your project management, but also supports you in all kinds of tasks.

Jira Software - Project Management Tool

Jira - Simple project management in IT and beyond

Want to know how Jira can be used in project management?

Atlassian Jira

Asana

Asana is simple and already offers some great features out-of-the-box and is great for small, specialized teams. Task management, Kanban boards, timeline and automations are quite easy to suspend.

With Kanban boards you can visually represent your projects. With the schedule tool you can see directly how far your projects have progressed. And with the integrated service desk form for your website, you can easily process requests for your products and share them with your team. 

Asana also offers you the possibility to expand the range of functions with integrations. For example, you can link your Google Drive or Dropbox or Slack directly with Asana. This way, all your important data is directly available in the app and you can collaborate with your team even better.

Another great feature of Asana is that you can easily track the progress of individual tasks. This makes it possible to visually display the status of individual tasks in real time. And you are always up to date if there is a problem at any point.

Monday

Asana was already simple, but Monday.com is a whole lot easier to deal with in terms of usability and user experience. Monday has the great advantage that the platform is suitable for a range of teams, working methods and departments. 

Besides the standard project management tools like task management or planning, Monday offers your teams the possibility to efficiently and effectively plan all tasks. However, the focus is explicitly on the easy collaboration of your teams directly on the platform. All conversations, briefings and data are stored in one central place. This saves the user additional meetings, emails and long phone calls. 

Besides the common integrations like Slack, Google Drive or Dropbox, Monday offers few extension options. However, it should be noted that Monday.com provides countless templates for scenarios and use cases that you can activate and use with just a few clicks. 

Summary: Project management tools in comparison

All three project management tools offer similar functionalities. Jira from Atlassian is the tool with the most plugins and integrations and offers the possibility to customize it exactly to your needs. 

Asana and Monday.com on the other hand are simply tools for small and medium teams that want to get started right out-of-the-box. However, special use cases and custom features are not possible with them.

Jira Software - Project Management Tool

Jira - Simple project management in IT and beyond

Want to know how Jira can be used in project management?

Atlassian Jira