In a previous blog, I had shared the steps to connect a service project to a Jira Kanban board. This enabled us to manage service requests with greater efficiency and transparency. However, other than the service requests, we might encounter a situation wherein we have a lot of routine activities but have no visibility on how the tasks are progressing. Kanban can be very effective in providing the full picture in such situations. This blog “Integrating Service and Software Workflows on a Single Kanban Board” will give the steps to connect software project tasks and service project tickets to a Kanban board.

It is common to have multiple boards in a Jira project. However, each board needs to have a specific purpose associated with it. This may include, Service requests, Incident management, development activities and so on. Let us consider that our software project in Jira will have one Kanban board to visualize the service requests and routine activities. While the other board ,i.e, the scrum board handles development activities. Here we are leveraging a single kanban board to visualize both the service requests and routine activities in different swimlanes.

We have the queues section in Jira SM that can be used to organize issues based on certain criteria. This helps the Operations team member to find and prioritize the work efficiently. However, there are some limitations like ranking and re-organizing issues in queues that can be overcome with the display on kanban. Also, Kanban provides much better visibility and navigation on a single board. Both Jira Software and Jira SM licenses are required to utilize the features mentioned in this blog post. First, we will focus on the automation process used to generate the issues. The latter part will be about linking them to the Kanban board.

Automation

In this section we will get to know, how to create issues for routine activities that will be displayed on the kanban board. The issues are created through the automation feature. Just create a sample automation ticket by navigating to Project setting>Automation. As displayed in the below picture create a sample rule and enable it. The point to note here is that we are adding the label section to the rule so that the tickets created will have the label as “ABC”. In the below example, the automation creates tickets every x minutes with the label “ABC,” where x is set to 5m.

When the automation rule executes, it creates sample ticket(s) under the issues section of the software project, as shown in the picture below.

Sometimes, it may be necessary to generate Jira tickets for certain alerts on an alerting tool (Example: Ospgenie). Convert these alerts into Jira tickets and move them to the Kanban board. Jira SM allows you to set rules under Teams > “Team name” > Go to Operations, where the integration and sync settings can be configured. The sync rule settings can be configured to create a ticket under a software project that will appear on the Kanban board.

Integration to Kanban Board

Now, we have the user service requests in the Service Project (Support) and automated tickets for routine activities in the Software Project (Scrum project). The next step is to link them to the Kanban board in the software project. On the top right of the kanban board, click on the three dots to select the “Configure board” option. This will take you to the settings section of the Kanban board as shown below.

The filter query,i.e, the JQL macro includes both the Scrum project and Support project, and filters the issues labeled “ABC”. You can toggle between the JQL and Basic options to switch between direct JQL entry and manual selection modes. The below picture depicts the manual selection of options.

Complete the option selection and save the filter. The Kanban board links both project types. As a result, it displays all issue type statuses from the projects as cards under the Columns subsection, as shown below. The next step is to customize the columns on the Kanban board. This ensures that the system reflects both software and service workflows, and you can arrange all the status cards accordingly. The workflow for Task and Service Request issue types will be as follows:

  • Software Workflow for Scrum project Task Issue type: “Open” → “In Progress” → “Closed”
  • Service Workflow for Support Service Request Issue type: “Waiting For Support” → “In Progress” → “Resolved”

You will be able to see all Scrum project Tasks & Stories labeled “ABC” on the Kanban board. Similarly, the Support Service Requests labeled “ABC” will appear on the board. Under the Swimlanes subsection of the settings, select “Projects” as the grouping method. This will display your Kanban board based on each project, as shown below:

Our board is ready, and we can use it to move the issue types through the various column statuses on the Kanban board.

Further Reading :