Jira Integration Overview

Overview

Kantata's Jira integration makes it possible for organizations to automatically synchronize project information between Kantata and Jira Software. Create Jira issues from Kantata OX and improve issue tracking within Jira, enabling reporting and issue resolution. Project status, logged time, and user communication can also be transferred between Kantata OX and Jira on a configurable schedule.

Getting Started

The integration requires that the Jira account is configured to allow remote API connections. This can be enabled by a Jira administrator in General Settings.

To get started, speak with your Account Executive or Kantata Support. 

Benefits

Kantata's Jira integration allows project teams to perform project activities in the application of their choice, while relying on either application to accurately present project information. This is useful for software development teams that use Jira for managing engineering stories and sprints, yet also need a unified project delivery solution like Kantata with broader project management, resource management, and business intelligence capabilities.

Key benefits include:

• Improved communication between team members using different systems
• Increased efficiency by avoiding redundant data entry through bidirectional communication between the two systems
• Improved reliability on the accuracy of information in each system

Functional Capabilities 

Mapping Scenarios

• Map Kantata OX Project to Jira Project
• Issues in Jira become Tasks in Kantata OX and vice versa 

• Map Kantata OX Project to Jira RapidBoard
• Sprints in Jira become top-level Tasks in Kantata OX
• Issues (User stories, Bugs etc.) in Jira become nested Tasks in Kantata OX
• Subtasks in Jira become nested Subtasks in Kantata OX
• Backlog Issues come over under a Backlog task in Kantata OX

Actions

• Create and update Tasks and Subtasks / Issues and Stories
• Create and update Comments
• Note: Kantata time is booked on a per day basis and no time entry over 24 hours can be booked for a day. This means that Jira time entries larger than 24 hours will come over to Kantata OX broken out in multiple time entries whose hours will add up to the total hours of the Jira time entry.
  • JIRA users not in your Kantata project are automatically invited to it when their time is entered against a Jira Issue or Subtask that is synced with the Kantata OX project.
• Capture the Epic, Fixed Versions and Jira Issue ID in custom fields of the corresponding Kantata Task.
• Configurable mappings for different Task types (milestones, deliverables, issues, etc.) and Statuses (not started, started, completed).

Configurable Options

• Select the frequency and schedule of your integration synchronization
• Select whether to send time entries from Jira to Kantata OX
• Select whether to include Jira subtasks
• Select whether to include the backlog
• Map specific field value pairs for certain fields (e.g. Task Statuses) between the two systems
• Map Kantata Users to Jira Users

Field Mappings

Time Entries

Comments

Note: Kantata OX Replies are not sent to Jira.

Sprints

Issues

* To pass estimates, time tracking has to be enabled and configured for your Jira project. For more information, refer to your Jira documentation: Configuring time tracking. When not configured properly, the following Jira error will be thrown: "Field 'timetracking' cannot be set. It is not on the appropriate screen, or unknown"

Notes

• Objects of the above types are created and updated. Deletes are not processed at this time.
• Jira Epics can be synchronized to Kantata OX Tasks on Project based scenarios. Epics do not synchronize to Tasks on Board based scenarios.
• Allow for syncing Kantata OX Tasks at all 5 levels to Jira Issues when the option to sync Jira Subtasks is not turned on in the synchronization definition.
  • When a new Jira Issue is created, the synchronization will create a new ML Task at the top level.
  • You can then move it to any other level in the project and the synchronization will keep it in sync with its Jira Issue without moving it from its new location.
  • The exception to this is the Sprint scenarios where the level 1 Kantata OX Tasks represent a Board's sprints and backlog. The second level of Tasks represent the Jira Issues.
• The Jira process for converting Jira issues to subtasks and Jira subtasks to issues is supported in that the Kantata OX tasks that represent the synced Jira issue/subtask moves accordingly. Due to this Jira process being a multi step user interfacing process, we cannot support this same functionality going from Kantata OX to Jira if you are using a "two-way" scenario. This means that if you move a Kantata OX task underneath another task, upon syncing, it will not be converted to a subtask in Jira. If you move a task out from under another task in Kantata OX, the synced Jira subtask will not become a Jira issue. If you have a need to do this conversion, you will need to do it in Jira.