Building software is a lot harder than it looks. Customer requirements evolve, priorities shift, dependencies form and break, and at times progress seems to be at odds with plans. Agile teams deal with this by embracing customer collaboration and healthy team interaction, as well as placing a premium on responding to change with speed.
However, when all is said and done, success is measured by how well software works in the hands of the customer. With this approach, end users who actually consume software can utilize the shipped product, and then provide genuine feedback. And it’s for this reason that we so strongly advocate the benefits of integrating the agile mindset with code implementation best practices such as git.
When tracking software development projects, it’s incredibly valuable to bring in complementary signals from your development tools. Having real-time data empowers you and your team to make more confident and informed decisions.
It’s worth noting and preparing for the harsh realities (such as seeing issues in the Done column that are not actually reviewed or not code complete) that often come to light when you’ve got access to real-time development data embedded in your issues. But we firmly believe that the more data a team has, the better. And having access to real-time data will ultimately benefit your team in the long run.
Scientifically proven
By surfacing explicit details on branches, commits, and pull requests in Jira Software, your team can spend less time reconciling code and issue status, and more time building great software.
According to our research, teams increase their key metrics when Jira Software and Bitbucket are connected, releasing 14% more often and closing 23% more issues. This fusion of planning and tracking enables your team to tie progress in Jira Software with the actual coding work being done, lifting team visibility and improving performance.
Over the past year, the Jira Software team has built and released tighter integrations with developer tools, moving agile teams closer than ever to the code that implements the software being planned and tracked in Jira Software.
Connect your repo
It’s our goal to ensure that every software team is aware of this connected value. To help, we’ve shipped a new connection point, conveniently located in the Jira Software sidebar, which allows team members to effortlessly connect each and every project to its associated repository.
How to use the Jira Software project to repository integration point
You’ll notice a new item in the sidebar where you can copy and paste the URL of your code repository.
Anyone in the team can kick off this process. If you don’t have the permissions to complete the connection, you’ll notice that the repository will be created in your sidebar, but will require completion by an admin or someone who has the necessary permissions. Don’t worry, we’ll send notifications their way and ask them to complete the connection on your behalf.
If you use Bitbucket, we’ll automatically detect Bitbucket URLs and pop up the steps to connect and activate the integration in just a few clicks.
But if you’re a GitHub user, we didn’t forget about you. Jira Software now automatically detect GitHub URLs as well. So no matter which code repository your team is using, you’ll be on your way to connecting your repositories to Jira Software in no time.
Once complete, your repository then has a permanent home in the project sidebar of Jira Software, enabling one-click access to your source code.
If your team is using other developer tools that they love, please raise an issue and let us know, as we’d love to hear what other tools you’d like us to support in the sidebar.
Watch the magic happen
Once your Jira Software project is integrated, and the issues and code are linked, your team will immediately enjoy the benefits of this powerful powerful integration, including: access to the development panel on Jira issues, workflow triggers, realtime release readiness reports, and more!
Remember to include the JIRA-KEY in your commit messages
Once connected, be sure to let your team know of the benefits they’ll enjoy when they include issue keys in their commit messages. And if your team is using Bitbucket Cloud, team members can even start coding directly from Jira issues by clicking Create branch on any Jira ticket. Jira Software will then automatically associate the issue with the newly created branch and its commits.
The benefits are immediate: visibility improves as dev information is automatically fed to Jira issues, and the overhead of providing manual updates to Jira becomes a thing of the past.
After connecting your Jira Software project to a repository, share this link with your team. It provides instruction on what to include in their git messages, and even more tricks provided with smart commits: Processing Jira Software issues with Smart Commit messages.
Enhance your entire software development process by linking issues with code and before long, you’ll begin seeing faster dev speed and increased team happiness. But don’t just take our word for it. Here are just a few of the things Jira Software teams are saying about the integration experience:
Tight integration with Bitbucket supports Agile processes, such as code reviews, continuous testing and builds…
It’s a great versatile tool for software engineering. The bug tracking and its integration with GitHub is invaluable. All round great tool.
So, what are you waiting for? Connect Jira Software to your code repository today using our new integration point and begin reaping the benefits of agile and git… together. And be sure to email this post to your team so they can get it set up, too!
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Note: At this time our new repository connection point is only available for Jira Software Cloud users.