Integrating JIRA Agile with your Confluence applications – Tutorial 14

This is the last article in the JIRA tutorial series, if you missed any article then you can refer this link “Complete Atlassian JIRA Tutorial Series” or checklist at the end of this article. We will discuss the Integrating JIRA Agile with Confluence, and Confluence team Calendars and how you can use these applications together to build the strongest user stories and the best plan for sprints or releases while streamlining your team’s work. Also, after integrating these applications you can create meeting notes within a very short time, wrap up a sprint with a retrospective report, and much more. We are going to discuss the integration of the JIRA-JIRA Agile-Confluence-Team Calendars features which could be helpful for your team.

Compatibility of the Integration in JIRA:

Below we can integrate all of these applications, make sure each of these applications is compatible with each other. It is recommended to use the latest version of these Atlassian products. If you are using JIRA Cloud and Confluence Cloud, then this compatibility set up already takes care of you. If you are installing all these applications by yourself then make sure of the version of these applications as given below.

Product	Version
JIRA	6.4.x or 6.3.x or later
JIRA Agile	6.3.5 or later
Confluence	5.4 or later
Team Calendars	4.2.1.2 or later

To make the integration work, do the following:

Link your JIRA instance to your Confluence site, and your JIRA project must be linked to a Confluence space.
To use Confluence Team Calendars along with JIRA Agile, link your Confluence site to your JIRA site. Please note that Confluence Team Calendars is a commercial add-on for Confluence.
Your users are required to have the following JIRA permissions.

Edit issue permission to create and link pages to an epic.
‘Project Admin’ permission to create and link pages to a sprint or sprint report.

Your users are required to have Confluence permissions such as Add Page permission for the appropriate space if you want them to create Confluence pages via JIRA Agile.

Planning epics in JIRA:

Using the integration of JIRA with confluence, if you have something hand-crafted specifications are written up in Confluence it could be easily linked with an epic in JIRA Agile. Doing so, if anybody is viewing the epic in JIRA Agile will able to view the Confluence linked pages and hence the interesting stuff there.

Creating a new linked Confluence page for an epic:

Below are the steps.

Move to the Backlog on your JIRA board.
To see the epic panel on the left-hand side of the screen, select Tools – Show Epic Panel.
Hover over the epic in the Epics panel and then click the small triangle at the left of the epic name to display the epic details.
At the bottom of the epic details in the Epics panel, click Linked Pages.
Click on the Create page. It will display the ‘Create’ dialog in Confluence asking to select Product Requirements Blueprint when viewing an epic in JIRA, you cannot create a new linked Confluence page. However, you can link an existing Confluence page to an epic.

Linking an existing Confluence page to an epic:

Below are the steps.

Move to the Backlog on your JIRA board.
To see the epic panel on the left-hand side of the screen, select Tools – Show Epic Panel.
Hover over the epic in the Epics panel and then click the small triangle at the left of the epic name to display the epic details.
At the bottom of the epic details in the Epics panel, click Linked Pages.
Click on the Link page, and search for the page that you want.
As you start typing the letter, the search will get enabled and when you get the desired page to be linked, just select it and link it there.

Planning sprints in JIRA:

With the Confluence Team calendars, you can manage team leaves, track projects, and plan events. It becomes easier to plan sprints around leave and events when Team Calendars are installed in Confluence. Now if you integrate JIRA Agile Sprints event to your team’s calendar in Confluence, while planning your sprints you will come to know whether team leave or events are going to impact current project release work.

Sprints with integrated Confluence team Calendars helps in estimating the hours of work for the available resources as the project planning management has the visibility of the available time which resource can spend while resolving the issues in JIRA. Thus, it increases the probability that the current project release will meet up the deadline.

This is how we can plan project sprints.

Managing sprints in JIRA:

Consider a scenario where your sprint is underway and during the project planning session, ideas are being discussed. Instead of jotting down those ideas on a rough paper, you can create a meeting notes page in Confluence using Meeting Notes blueprint directly from the sprint in JIRA Agile. Also, you can link your sprint to existing pages in Confluence.

Consider another scenario where your sprint wraps up and it generates a sprint report. Your team holds a retrospective to discuss on the sprint. Using this sprint report, you can create a page for your retrospective in Confluence. Also, you can link your sprint to the existing pages in Confluence.

This is how we can manage sprints.

Managing releases in JIRA:

Consider a scenario where the release is underway. We can create JIRA status reports in Confluence to provide updates on the current release to the project stakeholders. This JIRA status report helps in providing a snapshot of the release at a point in time. Using such integration, the stakeholders can view and monitor the project progress even though they don’t have access to JIRA.

Consider another scenario where a project release is just wrapped up. You can notify your project stakeholders about the changes items by providing them a JIRA change report in Confluence. Using this JIRA change report in Confluence you can also let know everyone knows about the accomplishment of your team even though they don’t have access to JIRA.

This is how we can manage releases.

Happy Testing!!!

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