AgileTools-Jira Connect

Inspiration

Throughout our working career, while working with many individuals, teams, and organizations, a common shortcoming keeps surfacing - lack of group focus. There are countless reasons people tend to work towards their individual goals hindering success at higher levels, like team, department, product, or the whole company.

An American sociologist Ron Westrum has developed a typology of organizational cultures. Every organization can be one of: pathological (power-oriented), bureaucratic (rule-oriented) and generative (performance-oriented). The fact that from our empirical observation most organizations that we came in contact with fall in the first and second typology and the urge to follow and fulfill the dreams of Kent Beck, one of the founders of Agile movement - to heal the wounds between the business and development, a tool to help with the best scrum practices started to emerge.

A common goal for all team members is a powerful concept that should have all the love from the tooling we use every day. Honoring the importance of Sprint Goal as described in the Scrum Guide, the Sprint Goal Success metric was shaped.

As important as it is, it is “only” a fragment of our mission to help organizations on their agile transformation journey. We are addressing one of the obstacles on that path - how to measure the progress. Evidence-Based Management is the theory we base upon in the toolset.

What it does

The interface application collects some additional information at two scrum events - at Sprint Planning and at Sprint Review. The additional information helps the teams to stay focused on a Sprint Goal and tracks the success rate by sending the data to a SaaS product Agile Tools.

Other information can be channeled from JIRA to Agile Tools to further help visualize the progress (or lack of) in four Key-Value Areas of the Evidence-Based Management framework.

How we built it

The AgileTools team prepared an API for delivering the values of the sprints directly to the AgileTools Portal, we started to setup an interface application on the development instance what would trigger the changes, once a complete sprint would be performed.

Sadly this is with current REST API of Jira not possible.

Challenges we ran into

The REST API of Jira does not support the changes of a sprint. It provides a possibility to control sprints from the remote application, however it does not support passing values one a sprint is changed in Jira. Also en extension of the sprint dialog or at least a WebHook or similar trigger is not provided, this has stopped us from further implementation, but decide to submit our project to generate some attention, what Jira does not support teams and and team based changes to the outside world as needed for EBM and needed events that are needed by SAFe or other bigger Scrum frameworks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a clear picture of the missing peaces and master the Atlassian-Connect extension while searching for the solution. We plan to continue to work on this issues and with some support of Atlassian maybe trigger a change in the REST API to provide additional interfaces.