Software development is intensely collaborative, requiring the effort of numerous people on many different teams. With so many stakeholders, it’s difficult to maintain speed, transparency, and quality when shipping code. Most development teams accept these things as facts of life when building software, but this doesn’t have to be the case any longer.
Building better software starts here
Today’s release of Confluence 5.4 brings Jira into Confluence – and Confluence into Jira – like never before, so your team can build better software, faster. When we say seamless integration, we mean it. We’ve made agile best practices the easiest practice, for your team and every team.
The flow of agile development
Before we dig into the details, let’s take a step back. We identified four key phases that agile teams flow through when building software, and we’ve focused on making the transition between each phase as seamless as possible.
- Define – Standardize your product requirements in Confluence, and track and manage the changes as they evolve over time.
- Plan – Turn requirements into Jira stories and jumpstart development, while always maintaining traceability back to your requirements.
- Report – Communicate the progress and achievements of your development team to the rest of the business to keep everyone informed.
- Improve – Reflect upon and improve your process by running retrospectives as you complete sprints.
Confluence and Jira: Two products, one flow
Half the teams that use Jira also use Confluence. Development teams live in Jira where they track their work; The rest of the business lives in Confluence where everyone collaborates around requirements, documentation, marketing plans, sales reports, and anything else that supports taking a product from concept to launch.
New integration features break down the barriers that separate your development team from your product managers and the rest of the business, streamlining how you plan and track your releases. Now you can standardize your requirements, maintain traceability, and continuously improve with one seamless flow between Confluence and Jira.
1. Jumpstart development with product requirements
Building great software requires even better planning, so we’ve made it easy to define your product requirements in Confluence where they’re standardized and customizable for your own processes. Using the Product Requirements Blueprint, anyone on your product team can contribute – your product managers, developers, and designers – and write the most informed requirements possible, helping the whole team plan to build quality software from the get-go.
Turn requirements into Jira issues, seamlessly
Once you have a completed and agreed-upon set of user stories, the next step is to get them into your team’s backlog in Jira. Now you can do just that without even leaving Confluence, no copying and pasting required. Just highlight a user story – or any text on a Confluence page – and click the Create Jira issue button that appears.
The days of creating Jira issue after Jira issue are over
If you highlight text in a table, you’ll be given the option to create issues for every row of the table (or every user story in this case) so you can create all your issues in one fell swoop. How awesome is that?!
2. Maintain traceability with automatic linking
Confluence automatically embeds your newly created Jira issues in your requirements document, so it’s easy for your product managers to keep up on the progress of the development team’s work being tracked in Jira.
Confluence links everything together for you
Product managers can now get a single, dynamic view of all the sprints, epics, and issues related to your requirements at the top of the page. Just click through into Jira for more information.
Access linked Confluence pages from Jira Agile
In order to build what’s been specified, your developers need quick access to related documentation in Confluence. Your requirements – and any other Confluence page, such as technical specifications or design guidelines – are automatically linked to your epics and issues in Jira Agile so your developers can get all the context they need without breaking their flow.
3. Communicate progress with Jira Reports in Confluence
If you’re a product manager or development manager, how many times have you been asked about the current status of the release? Stakeholders rely on what your team is building, but they don’t have visibility into your team’s progress so they always have to ask.
Now you can give them the transparency they need before you even get the question. Using the new Jira Report Blueprint, you can communicate the progress of your releases with quick-to-create ad-hoc status reports and change logs.
4. Reflect and improve with retrospectives
Agile development is easier said then done, so we’ve built an agile best practice right into Confluence. Once your sprint is finished, it’s important to reflect on your team processes so you can make the next sprint better. That starts with running a retrospective with the new Retrospective Blueprint in Confluence.
Kick off retrospectives in Confluence from Jira Agile
When your scrum master has completed a sprint in Jira Agile, they they can kick off a retrospective in Confluence with a single click.
Define what went well, what didn’t, and what could be improved for next time by assigning tasks.
Start building better software today
Free your development team from the everyday frictions that slow them down. Plan and track your next release the right way with new, seamless integration between Confluence and Jira.
OnDemand customers
You’ve been auto-upgraded. Enjoy!
Download customers
- For the ability to create Jira issues from text in a Confluence page you need to upgrade to Confluence 5.4 and have an application link toJira 6.1.3 or above.
- For the ability to view linked pages and start retrospectives from Jira Agile you need to upgrade to Confluence 5.4 and have an application link to Jira 6.1.3 or above with Jira Agile 6.3.5 or above installed.
New to Confluence?
Get up and running in a matter of minutes with a free Confluence and Jira OnDemand trial.
Check out more collaboration tips and tricks from Atlassian.