Best practices for integrating JIRA with Typo

This blog was originally published in the Typo blog.

Developed by Atlassian, JIRA is widely used by organizations across the world. Integrating it with Typo, an intelligence engineering platform, can help organizations gain deeper insights into the development process and make informed decisions.

Below are a few JIRA best practices and steps to integrate it with Typo.

What is JIRA?

Launched in 2002, JIRA is a software development tool agile teams use to plan, track, and release software projects. This tool empowers them to move quickly while staying connected to business goals by managing tasks, bugs, and other issues. It supports multiple languages including English and French.

P.S: You can get JIRA from Atlassian Marketplace.

Integrating JIRA with Typo

Integrate JIRA with Typo to get a detailed visualization of projects/sprints/bugs. It can be further synced with development teams’ data to streamline and fasten delivery. Integrating also helps in enhancing productivity, efficiency, and decision-making capabilities for better project outcomes and overall organizational performance.

Below are a few benefits of integrating JIRA with Typo:

• Typo has a centralized dashboard for all project-related activities.
• It provides detailed insights and analytics to help in making informed decisions based on real-time data.
• It identifies potential risks and issues in the early stages to reduce the chance of project delays or failures.
• It ensures that team members are on the same page through real-time updates.
• Typo provides insights into resource utilization for the optimal allocation of team members and other resources.

Typo Best Practices

The best part about JIRA is that it is highly flexible. Hence, it doesn’t require any additional change to the configuration or existing workflow:

Incident Management

Incidents refer to unexpected events or disruptions that occur during the development process or within the software application. These incidents can include system failures, bugs, errors, outages, security breaches, or any other issues that negatively impact the development workflow or user experience.

• Incidents Opened: Incidents Opened represent the number of production incidents that occurred during the selected period. It can be calculated based on the number of tickets created for incidents.
• Incident — Avg resolution time: It represents the average hours spent to resolve a production incident. It can be calculated based on the average time it takes for an incident ticket to transition from an ‘In Progress’ state to a ‘Done’/’Completed’ state.

A few JIRA best practices:

• Define workflow for different types of incidents such as reports and resolutions.
• Ensure all relevant data such as incident status are accurately synced between Typo and JIRA.
• Archive incidents that are obsolete and no longer active. Keep the system clean and performant.
• Make sure that incidents are logged with clear, concise, and detailed descriptions and names.
• Update regularly to reflect current progress i.e. status changes and assignee updates.

Sprint Analysis

The Sprint analysis feature allows you to track and analyze your team’s progress throughout a sprint. It uses data from Git and issue management tool to provide insights into how your team is working. You can see how long tasks are taking, how often they’re being blocked, and where bottlenecks are occurring.

• Work Progress: It represents the percentage breakdown of Issue tickets or Story points in the selected sprint according to their current workflow status.
• Work Breakup: It represents the percentage breakdown of Issue tickets in the current sprint according to their Issue Type or Labels.
• Team Velocity: It represents the average number of completed Issue tickets or Story points across each sprint.
• Developer Workload: It represents the count of Issue tickets or Story points completed by each developer against the total Issue tickets/Story points assigned to them in the current sprint.
• Issue Cycle Time: It represents the average time it takes for an Issue ticket to transition from the ‘In Progress’ state to the ‘Completion’ state.

A few JIRA best practices are:

• Analyze historical data from the integration of JIRA and Typo to identify trends and patterns.
• Custom fields in JIRA must be mapped correctly to Typo’s feature for accurate reporting.
• Ensure detailed and consistent logging of issues, user stories, and more.
• Leverage the sprint analysis feature to review key metrics such as work progress, velocity, and cycle time. Ensure that the data from JIRA is accurately reflected in these metrics.
• Utilize JIRA’s automation to streamline processes such as moving tasks to different statuses, sending notifications, and updating fields.

Planning Accuracy

It reflects the measure of Planned vs Completed tasks in the given period. For a given time range, Typo considers the total number of issues created and assigned to the members of the selected team in the ‘To Do’ state and divides them by the total number of issues completed out of them in the ‘Done’ state.

A few JIRA best practices are:

• Use a standardized estimation technique (Eg: Story points, hours, etc) for all tasks and stories in JIRA.
• Analyze past data to refine future estimates and improve planning accuracy.
• Set up automated alerts for significant deviations in planning accuracy.
• Foster a collaborative environment (such as daily standups) where team members can openly communicate about task estimates and progress.

Common Best Practices of Using Git and JIRA Together

Below are other common JIRA best practices that you and your development team must follow:

• Linking Jira Issues with Git Commits

1. Commit Messages: Always include the Jira issue key in your commit messages (e.g., “PROJECT-123: Fix bug in user login”). This helps in tracking code changes related to specific issues.
2. Branch Names: Create branches that include the Jira issue key (e.g., “feature/PROJECT-123-new-feature” or “bugfix/PROJECT-123-fix-login-bug”).

• Automating Workflow with Jira Smart Commits: Use Jira smart commit messages to automate issue transitions and log work directly from Git. For example, “PROJECT-123 #close #comment Fixed the bug causing login failure” can close the issue and add a comment.
• Branching Strategy: Adopt a clear branching strategy (e.g., Gitflow, GitHub Flow) and align it with your Jira workflow. For example, creating feature branches for new features, hotfix branches for urgent fixes, and release branches for preparing production releases.
• Enforcing Commit Standards: Use Git hooks or CI/CD pipelines to enforce commit message formats that include Jira issue keys. This ensures consistency and traceability.
• Pull Requests and Code Reviews: Reference Jira issues in pull requests and ensure that pull request titles or descriptions include the Jira issue key. This helps reviewers understand the context and scope of changes. Use Jira to track code reviews and approvals. Integrate your code review tool with Jira to reflect review statuses.
• Integrating Build and Deployment Pipelines: Integrate your CI/CD pipelines with Jira to automatically update issue statuses based on build and deployment events. For instance, moving an issue to “Done” when a deployment is successful.

Steps for Integrating JIRA with Typo

Follow the steps mentioned below:

Step 1

Typo dashboard > Settings > Dev Analytics > Integrations > Click on JIRA

Step 2

Give access to your Atlassian account

Step 3

Select the projects you want to give access to Typo or select all the projects to get insights into all the projects & teams in one go.

And it’s done! Get all your sprint and issue-related insights in your dashboard now.

Conclusion

Implement these best practices to streamline Jira usage, and improve development processes, and engineering operations. These can further help teams achieve better results in their software development endeavors.

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