Jira Integration Overview

Learn how to use our integration with Jira.

Katie Roberts avatar
Written by Katie Roberts
Updated over a week ago

Integrate ProductPlan with Jira to better connect your strategic roadmap to your specific project details that are being planned and tracked in Jira. The integration lets you connect ProductPlan Bars or Containers with Jira Epics or other issues.

You can link to existing issues or you can create new ones from ProductPlan and push them to Jira. After linking, you can choose to automatically synchronize data in ProductPlan with updates in Jira.

The integration works with Jira Cloud, as well as versions 7-9 of Server and Data Center. If you have an on-premise Jira server, it will need to be accessible from outside the firewall. You can find the steps for configuration, either for the cloud or on-premise server here, or contact support@productplan.com for further assistance.

Watch the setup video here.

Custom Mapping of Fields for Jira

Once you have successfully configured the integration you can begin choosing which custom fields you’d like to map. First, select a Jira project where all desired fields are represented and will be synced to ProductPlan, examples include: summary, description, labels, lane, legend and dates. You will be able to link from multiple Jira projects to ProductPlan later on, but the initial setup requires one project to source sample fields from to build out the mapping.

For Basic Plans, the default mapped fields between ProductPlan and Jira are fixed and include: Title, Description, Tags, Percent Complete, Start Date, End Date, and Notes.

For Professional and Enterprise Plans, you will be able to customize which fields in Jira will map to the core fields in ProductPlan, as well as add additional fields. If your team is utilizing Custom Text Fields, you will also have the option to map those fields to your desired Jira fields as well.

For information on upgrading to our Professional or Enterprise subscriptions email us at sales@productplan.com.

Note: You will not be able to hit Sync until you have configured the mapping.

Roadmaps you own will display your field settings in the Integrations section of the roadmap settings, so that you and your roadmap editors can view them at any time.

Roadmap-Level Settings

Professional and Enterprise customers can set additional integration capabilities for each roadmap. As a roadmap owner, you can opt to display imported and synced Epics as Containers on the roadmap. You can also sync dependency information when your Jira issues use the "Blocked" or "Is Blocked By" type of link. You may enable these settings at any time by clicking on the Roadmap Settings button, going to the Integrations section, then selecting the pertinent checkboxes. Additional instructions on these settings can be found here.

You can link existing Roadmap Bars and Containers to Epics or other issues in Jira. You can either link them to existing issues or create new issues to push to Jira. You can link multiple issues from Jira to a single Bar or Container in ProductPlan, although syncing information with the Bar or Container will be disrupted. You can also link to a Jira query, which will allow you to link to multiple issues in Jira at once.

Note: When you Link a Bar or Container to an item in Jira, any information in the Bar or Container will be overridden by the information pulled from Jira.

To link to an existing Jira Epic or Issue, click on a Bar or Container and click "Integrations" from the left-hand side menu.

Jira will give you the option to Link to Existing or Create New. By selecting Link to Existing, you may search for an existing issue.

The Create New option will prompt you to fill out the appropriate details to push back to Jira.

Once linked, you and your viewers can click between ProductPlan and the Jira issue.

Synchronizing With Jira

You can set ProductPlan to automatically update the fields from Jira to a Bar or Container. You can choose to sync Percent Complete based on:

  • The number of stories completed in an Epic

  • Story points of all stories in an Epic or Issue

You can configure these options from your integrations page. Once set up, the roadmap will automatically sync daily at 10:00 pm PST, or you can manually sync any time by clicking the Sync Now button.  You can read more about synchronizing fields with Jira here.

Importing From Jira to ProductPlan

You can import multiple issues from Jira directly to your Parked section of the Table Layout in your roadmap. Importing issues will automatically create the issue links in ProductPlan. Importing from Jira can also bring in and sync any labels as tags in ProductPlan. You are able to schedule an automatic, daily import of your Jira Issues page so as to automate your roadmapping process even more. Read more about importing from Jira here.

Configuring Bars to Synchronize

Once the synchronization is set up, any new ProductPlan Bars or Containers that you link to Jira will automatically be synchronized. You’ll need to manually set the synchronization for any Bars or Containers that you previously linked to Jira.

  • To disable the synchronization, click the plug icon on the Bar/Container Details screen. The plug icon will appear with a minus sign next to it. You can then set the fields manually.

  • You can enable the synchronization by clicking the plug icon. To confirm it is working, verify that the text boxes are grayed out and the normal plug icon reappears.

(disabled)

(enabled)

Security

We use Jira’s OAUTH for identity management, so at no point are user passwords entered into or stored on our system. Revocable tokens are stored on a per-user basis, ensuring that each user’s access in the system matches their access in Jira. ProductPlan’s connection to Jira APIs is via an SSL-encrypted transaction.

Notes

  • If you are working in a Jira Kanban board, Jira Epics will be marked as complete only if the issue is in the green “Done” column (or whatever you have renamed the last column).

  • ProductPlan is compatible with Jira Server and Jira Data Center. If you are using 9.0 or later, please contact our customer support team to complete your integration setup.

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