How to configure and use the JIRA Connector
ℹ️ This feature is currently in our beta phase. This means we are testing it with our customers. The user experience may also not be ideal yet. If you are running into issues, please let us know at support@columinity.com
Columinity allows teams to collect flow metrics from Atlassian JIRA through, specifically cycle time, work-in-progress and throughput. This provides a useful additional source of data to include when analyzing overall team effectiveness. Process metrics are available under "Insights" in the Team Report, Teams Dashboard and Coaching Center:
- A "Professional"- or "Enterprise"-plan.
- A cloud-based instance of JIRA, with the ability to install apps from JIRA's marketplace
- A user account in Columinity with administrative permissions in at least 1 Teams Dashboard.
Configuring the integration with JIRA requires three steps:
- The integration needs to be created in Columinity.
- The Columinity app needs to installed on your JIRA instance from JIRA's marketplace.
- The boards from JIRA need to be mapped to teams in Columinity.
- Go to a Teams Dashboard. If you have multiple Teams Dashboard, you can repeat this process if you wish to import metrics from the same or another Azure DevOps instance into other Teams Dashboards.
- Click "My account".
- Click "Integrations".
- Click "New".
- For "Platform", choose "JIRA".
- For "Enabled", choose "Enabled", unless you wish to create an inactive integration first.
- Click "Save" to create the integration
- Once the integration is created, copy the "Webhook Key" that is shown. You will need this to configure the Columinity app in JIRA.
Once the integration is created, you can configure the Columinity app in JIRA to start sending data to Columinity for metric calculation.
The Columinity app can be installed from JIRA's marketplace. Once the app is installed, you need to set the webhook key:
- Log in to JIRA.
- In the sidebar, click "Apps".
- Click the bullets and choose "Manage apps".
- Click the Columinity app in the sidebar.
- Enter the Webhook Key provided by Columinity for your integration with JIRA.
- Click "Save".
Once the plugin is active, it will push metadata about work issues to Columinity every 24 hours. A green checkmark will appear in front of the integration in Columinity (see above) to indicate successful communication. If communication has not yet happened, or there was a failure, a yellow warning sign will appear. However, one final step is required to see flow metrics though, which is to map teams from Azure DevOps to teams in Columinity.
Although this integration pulls metrics from all teams in an Azure DevOps instance, it only stores those that have been mapped to teams in Columinity. This mapping has to be created manually for each team.
- In the "Integrations" page (see previous step), click the bullets behind the JIRA integration you wish to map teams for.
- Click "Team mappings"
- If there are boards or teams available that can be mapped, you have the option to add a new one. Otherwise you either have to create more teams in Columinity, or wait up to 24 hours for new boards from JIRA to be imported into Columinity.
- Under "Remote source", select the remote board from JIRA.
- Under "Team to map to", select the team in Columinity to map the remote board to.
- Under "Workflow state indicating 'To Do'", enter the name of the state, column or swim lane that indicates work items that are planned, but not yet started. This can also be states like 'Ready' or 'Backlog', as long as a work item leaving this state for any of the other states except 'Done' and excluded states indicates that this team starts actively working on it.
- Under "Workflow state indicating 'Done'", enter the name of the state, column or swim lane that indicates work items that are completed by this team. This can also be states like 'Completed' or 'Finished', as long as a work item entering this state indicates that this team has finished all work on it.
- Under "Workflow states indicating 'In Progress'", you can manually provide the names of states, columns or swim lanes that indicate that a work item should be considered in progress for this team. If left empty, Columinity will treat any state other than what is provided under 'To Do' and 'Done' as 'In Progress'. This is useful when there are certain pre-work states that should not be counted, or when there are strong reasons to exclude certain states.
Once you're done mapping teams, it can now take up to 24 hours for Columinity to retrieve flow metrics from JIRA. A team report will show the most recent process metrics from at most 1 month back from the start date of the snapshot. This allows you to see changes over time in process metrics.
- This integration runs on JIRAs ecosystem. No credentials or security tokens are needed. The app only posts metadata from work issues (ID, start- and end date) to Columinity. This meta data is only used to calculate process metrics and is then discarded.