Enjoy this previously written blog by myself for a solution partner. It explores how why you may look to integrate more of your Atlassian stack.

Introduction

Talented teams can create amazing software with great organisation of the product strategy and end user experiences. Jira Software has helped these teams by bringing them further structure to their work. However, developers spend their lives coding, and are often in Jira the least, which can create disconnect between the tickets and their code. This can cause headaches for product owners (POs) or project managers (PMs) overseeing the vision and releases. So how do we keep developers coding, but keep transparency for the PMs and POs to build strategy and understand current standings? Do you ask the developers to spend time manually updating all their Jira tickets? Or do you ask your PMs and POs to walk through the code repositories held within applications such as GitLab or Bitbucket to review what is going on? This article will answer that exact question.

What is Jira Software?

Regardless of the version of Jira you choose (Jira Work Management, Jira Service Management, Jira Software (JSW)), it has always been flexible to your business's needs. Every company has different data capture requirements, ways of workings and meanings for the milestones of work. With Jira’s custom fields and workflow designer, you can be sure that Jira will meet your needs. One of JSW’s unique features are their boards. The agile boards provide teams that follow different methodologies the option to bring their style of work into the digital space and visualise their workload in an agile format. The two types of boards are Kanban and Scrum. While the boards themselves look and work very similar, there are some unique features for both. Scrum boards allow you to create sprints where you can drag and drop items of work, providing focus for the given sprint length. You can define the sprint length (1-4 weeks) with the pre-set options or use the custom date picker to choose your start and end date. This keeps the board clean of noise and distractions from the backlog of work the team may have. Kanban boards on the other hand are designed for the continuous stream of work. While you can have a designated backlog view to keep the board cleaner and more focused, there is no physical start and stop of the focused work. When creating a software project, you can choose whether you would like to work in a Scrum or Kanban fashion. This is just to get you started. Once up and running, you can create as many boards as you want, and of both types, and tie them to a project. There are no limits on quantity or types of boards.

To make sure the board suits your team's needs, you can add different columns or swim-lanes to help visualise the split of work.

What is Bitbucket?

To understand Bitbucket, we first need to explain Git. Git is a distributed version control system (vcs) that allows you to take a snapshot of files to provide a history of evolution of that file. Every time you make a change and then commit the change, Git takes a snapshot of the project and records where changes have happened on the files. If one file has not changed, it won't save a new copy, it’ll just link back to the previous one. Bitbucket is Atlassian’s Git repository management system. It encases Git to provide teams a centralised location to store and collaborate on all of their software’s code. It offers teams a way to manage access to the repositories, create detailed code reviews and use Bitbucket pipelines to build, test and deploy with its integrated CI/CD. It also has built in security scan reports making sure you always deliver quality software, and, of course, it integrates with Jira software to plug the gap between the developers writing the code, and the PMs/POs needing the information.

Why would you integrate them?

Integrating critical business systems can provide opportunities for less context switching and more efficient and productive teams. Without integrating Jira and Bitbucket, your users may be found having to input the same information into both systems. Instead, critical information is updated automatically, which allows for faster decision making and removes potential confusion by eliminating data inconsistencies. As the systems are automatically synchronised, your users have more time to focus on their jobs instead of these admin tasks.

Please note:

To get the two applications integrated, you will need to be a workspace admin inside the Bitbucket workspace and a Jira admin.

To get started with the integration, head towards the products administration console on Jira by clicking the cog in the top right, then products. From here, select DVCS Accounts and follow the onscreen wizard to link the applications.

So now we have the tools integrated, what are we going to see? Both Jira and Bitbucket will gain some additional fields. To start with, from Jira, your projects will now have the ability to create branches directly from the tickets.

Returning to the ticket will allow you to open an additional screen, which helps to keep a full picture of what is going on.

From Bitbucket, you will have the ability to open Jira tickets directly, add comments and transition or edit custom fields, which allows for less context switching and more efficient teams.

No team wants to repeat work that automation can do for them. Automation for Jira can remediate some of the more manual tasks your business may have by using their DevOps specific triggers. The automation library now contains common use cases for you and your team to get up and running quicker, allowing your team to focus on the code and not on tickets. Check here for known templates - Jira automation Bitbucket, Github and Gitlab | Atlassian

If you require additional help to excel your company onto the right path and get the most out of the Atlassian software, DTC is here. We can guide you through this journey with our discovery workshops, designed to get a deep understanding of how your business runs to propel from the get go. We can also offer implementation consultancy, both 1:1 mentoring or whole class training and are around to assist at a moments notice with our experts on demand offer.