Jira Workflow Documentation

We want to provide a solution for better documentation of Jira workflows in Confluence. There should be an easy way to translate Jira workflow configuration into Confluence documentation.

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Inspiration

If you set up complex Jira workflows, which affect also users who aren't working with Jira that often, they might be opening Jira issues and don't know what to do next. What is expected in each status of the workflow? Who has something to do? What are the conditions to proceed? As admin who set up the workflow you probably know the answers to those questions. You have the technical background to explain all the conditions, validators or post functions which might exist. But the users don't have that knowledge and they might be asking what to do and why some users do have different options and possibilities in a workflow compared to themselves. This problem inspired us to provide a simple way to translate technical workflow configuration in Jira to a descriptive process documentation on a Confluence page.

What it does

As described above, Jira workflow documentation is translating technical workflow configuration to process documentation. All rules and elements of a workflow are written automatically to a Confluence page leaving space for additional description or remarks to explain the whole process. This Confluence page gets automatically created for each Jira workflow and contains a table describing all steps with transitions and their conditions, validators and post functions.

How we built it

We used the Atlassian Connect framework to build the app.

Challenges we ran into

As it is our first Atlassian Cloud app the whole project was a challenge ;-) In detail we faced the following challenges:

  • Authentication across Jira and Confluence. Authentication of Jira app to create confluence page
  • Getting all relevant workflow information from Jira
  • Create a section in manage apps in Jira to store information on workflow documentation space and pages
  • Data storage of target Confluence spaces for workflow documentation

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building an app that works between Jira and Confluence and that stores Jira workflow information on Confluence pages. We are proud to have accomplished to get the relevant information from Jira configuration and to store it in a structured way in Confluence cloud to provide additional value for Jira users.

What we learned

We learned how the Atlassian Connect Framework works, how it can be used to built an app and that everything is possible in Atlassian cloud products that we know from Atlassian server products. That is where we come from and with this project we started to work in a completely new environment. We are proud that we get the app to work also in this new area of application and that we managed almost all challenges we faced during this project.

What's next for Jira Workflow Documentation

We want to get the app to a more sophisticated status to be able to publish it on the Atlassian Marketplace. In order to achieve that we need to improve the storage of data (storage location of Jira workflow documentation in Confluence) and the possibility to efficiently use the app for all interested customers. Intensive testing of different use cases also needs to be done as next step.

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