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Introduction
Jile enables organizations to align strategy to team execution by providing a unified view from portfolios and programs to teams, helps business stakeholders and teams to collaborate effectively, thereby delivering valuable software faster to the market. Through its lean budgeting and allocation, Jile further helps the business stakeholders make wise investment decisions in response to business outcomes to achieve targeted business goals. The Ideas are refined and planned by allocating those into different Iterations, which are defined under a Program Increment. These ideas are developed, tested and further deployed in the specified environments.
For an organization, Jile is used to achieve
- Portfolio – It allows managing Vision, Goals and Initiatives
- Product – At this level, one can track and manage Features, Roadmaps and Releases
- Teams – Responsible for planning and tracking the work.
The Scenario
Though the pre-project initiation phase and the initial planning is done in Jile, it has been observed as a general practice that the project teams show keen interest and are found to be more comfortable in working on Atlassian Jira in the execution of the Projects. The Project teams, in Jira, create corresponding Projects and define Releases and Iterations under it. Further, they define the Features, decompose those Features into one or multiple User Stories. To categorize the work to implement each User Story, Tasks and Sub Tasks are defined and resources are allocated to each. The resources do their work and update time entries. This actual time is manually fed into Jile for the purpose of comparing the deviations, if any, between the Planned and Actual durations for a Project and hence, tracking the further time required to get the project to its completion.
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Challenges
However, this current mode of working posed some serious challenges to the two teams working from Jile and Jira and hence, to the organization.
- Jile and Jira tools work in silos. Hence, a lot of manual intervention is required to manage the artifacts and their related information.
- Manual hand-offs are required by the teams to add Releases, Iterations, Epics and Features in both the tools and also update the information in the other tool when any new information is added in the source tool.
- Same artifact information resides in Jile and Jira without any linkages between them.
- No Traceability between the artifacts.
- Lack of communication and collaboration between the Jile and Jira teams.
Proposed Scenario
To address the above challenges, Kovair proposed a working scenario that involves establishing an integration bridge between Jile and Jira tools that would eradicate the isolation and utilize the effectiveness of Jile and Jira tools and thereby, deliver the maximum productivity value to the teams and to the organization.
The following scenario has been proposed:
- Setup business strategy for your enterprise in Jile
- Let Teams continue to use Jira for technical execution
- Get alignment between technical execution and business strategy with a combination of Jile & Jira
- Get a real-time rolled-up view of all the work across the enterprise
- Make technical execution purpose-centric by providing visibility into business strategy
- Realize agility of your enterprise
Advantages
Managing Portfolio
The integration between Kovair and Jile would enable enterprises to manage a portfolio of projects. It helps teams define and manage high-level strategy and business goals through processes such as Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), Agile Portfolio Management and more. The working team can link work, based on the high-level goals.
Team Collaboration
The Kovair adapter for JILE was developed keeping in mind the fact that every software development and delivery team is different and needs a customizable approach. Thus, the integration between Kovair and JILE is a flexible, generic solution that meets the needs of every team. Teams pick the high–priority user stories, drill them down into small tasks, estimating the tasks and stopping when they’ve reached the amount of work to which they can commit for that time period. Instead of planning the iteration in advance, Kanban teams define the number of user stories they can work on at any given time.
The Solution
The above scenario is effectively and easily achieved by implementing an integrated ecosystem involving Jile and Jira using Kovair Omnibus.
The Kovair Omnibus Adapter for Jile provides a full scope of collaboration between multiple teams. When each team has the comfort of using the tools of their choice, greater efficiency and productivity can be achieved. Kovair Omnibus Jile adapter supports a bidirectional flow of data between Jile and Jira. The integration between Jile and Jira provides real-time visibility into development progress for the required top-level requirements. Moreover, product teams will be able to link all user stories, task and test cases associated with the top-level Epics. This facilitates the collaborators to see the same data in the ecosystem, irrespective of what tools they use, thereby providing an end to end visibility in “Strategy to Execution” for your organization
Integration Use Cases
The following bidirectional and uni-directional integration use cases have been successfully achieved by implementing the integration ecosystem between Jile and Jira tools.
| Jile | Jira | |
| Create Program Increment with a specified duration, say 4 weeks | –> | 4 Sprints corresponding to each of the 4 Iterations should be automatically created |
| Select a specified duration of each Iteration, say 1 week | ||
| 4 Iterations get automatically created | ||
| Create Feature with Status as “Funnel” in a Project | –> | The feature gets automatically added with Status “New” in the corresponding mapped Project |
| Update the Feature Status to “Backlog” | –> | The status of the Feature gets automatically updated to “To be Planned” |
| Add Stories link to Feature | –> | Stories get added and linked to Feature automatically |
| Update the Status of the Stories to “Backlog” | –> | The status of the Stories gets automatically updated to “To be Planned” |
| Create Task under each Story with Status as “To Do” | –> | The Tasks gets automatically created with Status as “To Do” under each of the corresponding Stories |
| The feature gets automatically added with Status “Funnel” in the corresponding mapped Project | <– | Create Feature with Status as “New” in a Project |
| The status of the Feature gets automatically updated to “Backlog” | <– | Update the Feature Status to “To be Planned” |
| Stories get added and linked to Feature automatically | <– | Add Stories link to Feature |
| The status of the Stories gets automatically updated to “Backlog” | <– | Update the Status of the Stories to “To be Planned” |
| The Tasks gets automatically created with Status as “To Do” under each of the corresponding Stories | <– | Create Task under each Story with Status as “To Do” |
| The Stories gets automatically linked to the corresponding Iterations and hence to the appropriate Teams assigned to each of the Iteration | <– | Plan / link Stories into Sprints in Jira |
| Start Iteration for the particular Team | –> | Sprint for the particular Team gets automatically started |
| Close a particular Iteration | –> | The corresponding Sprint gets automatically Closed |
A pictorial representation of all the above use cases could be depicted in the following manner.
Benefits
The benefits that are derived from this integration bridge are
- Single Traceability View to show the entire hierarchy.
- Get faster feedback at every stage of the lifecycle and take corrective actions to resolve problems proactively.
- Better management of Scrum and Kanban projects to achieve business goals.
- Managing stories, features, iterations and defects through integrations with other ecosystem tools.
- Improves team efficiency through better collaboration across different teams and data synchronization between different tools.
Conclusion
We all know that it is burdensome to recover from a wrong integration solution, cope up with losses, and implement the entire solution correctly. So, why not have a concrete integration solution in place beforehand, rather than encountering the dreadful losses and then thinking of their cure?
Kovair Omnibus offers integration capabilities of more than 110+ tools across areas of ALM, PLM, CRM, ITSM, ERP and PPM. These capabilities from Kovair Omnibus Integrations enable Jile’s enterprise customers to synchronize with any of these 110+ applications readily in a matter of hours to significantly advance either their applications development process or integrate their infrastructure with very popular Business and Security applications. These integrations will also introduce enterprises to the entire concept of Value Stream Management through Kovair integrations and analytics.
