This is a guest post from acocon GmbH – business division greenique, a German software development team and Atlassian Gold Solution Partner, specialised in process enhancement and IT service management. As enthusiastic users of Atlassian products such as JIRA and Confluence ourselves, we are here to make you love the tools for perfect teamwork as much as we do. acocon GmbH is also a Marketplace vendor that develops add-ons for JIRA and Confluence – making your teamwork and process management more transparent, more efficient and a lot easier.
The following blog post features our add-on PrOps for JIRA – Integrate OTRS that gives you the opportunity to portray entire OTRS queues and assigned tickets to a specified user on your JIRA Dashboard – combining two lists.
OTRS and JIRA: connect your service and project organization with PrOps
Since its launch in 2001, OTRS has become a reliable and established solution for IT organizations dealing with service management. The operational scenarios range from managing incidents over processing product specific requests or changes, to general IT support.
However, OTRS is mainly used within service organizations. Project organizations on the other hand often use Atlassian JIRA® as their core solution for managing their tasks – irrespective of the nature of the project.
Information from service processes is indispensable
For the development team, it is vital to have access to the information from the service process, because incidents, change requests and new features are reported there. Typical questions that arise for the team involve:
- Which OTRS tickets are relevant for us?
- How can I create a software bug or change request from an incident?
- How can I inform the service desk (1st level) about the status and further process?
- How can I usefully connect information from OTRS with my JIRA issues to make the execution as simple as possible for my team?
One solution that connects these two worlds is the add-on PrOps for JIRA – Integrate OTRS. It provides a connection between the two programs. Hence, you do not have to switch from JIRA to OTRS anymore, which creates a more transparent and easier workflow.
Staying on top of OTRS tickets, converting and linking them to JIRA issues
Gadget to display OTRS tickets
The project manager as well as the development team need the information from the service process. PrOps enables the display of any OTRS queues on the JIRA dashboard.
For example, a product queue could be used to show all product relevant requests. Not only does the project manager easily keep an overview of all received tickets, the executing team gets its own individual view of the incoming tickets as well. Consequently, the constant search for particular tickets is no longer an issue.
Gadget configuration
Selection of the required queues or affected worker and groups.
Dashboard
Display of the tickets, conversions and links.
How to convert and link OTRS tickets into JIRA issues
Using the “convert” function, it is possible for the responsible project manager to create a JIRA issue within any project once a request or error is sent to the development team via the service process. This issue will then be bidirectionally linked with the OTRS ticket. The summary, description and ticket-ID is transferred directly into the new issue.
Conversion
The conversion of a ticket into a JIRA issue.
JIRA issue details
Adopting field information, labels and links.
Since different users often report the same incidents, it’s important to link those with a known issue within the project management system. Using the integrated search option from JIRA, it is then possible to find issues that came into the system via PrOps. Furthermore, an article is created within the OTRS ticket, showing the link information. Now, a service desk employee can easily see that the issue already reached the development team and is being dealt with.