JIRA is one of the most popular ways for developers to manage their workload, plan their priorities and track their time. While Accelo has had a JIRA integration for over three years, it’s only been able to connect JIRA issues to the Accelo Service (or Ticket) Module. Additionally, the current integration requires users to make the connection from the Accelo side - which isn't ideal for developers who's flow is to create and start working on issues in JIRA right away.
These limitations were annoying for developers and project managers. Developers want to spend their time focused in JIRA and working on code. Project managers meanwhile had to nag developers to log their project time separately in Accelo to ensure projects stayed within scope. With these frustrations in mind, we’ve been working hard to revamp this integration for our users and are excited to invite some of our clients to test what we’ve got as a part of our beta!
The biggest change to this upgrade will be extending how Accelo syncs with JIRA: instead of syncing an Accelo Issue, the integration will now sync Accelo Tasks. This means JIRA can now sync with Projects, Milestones and Retainers in addition to Tickets!
This will allow work in JIRA - be it comments on a ticket or work logs - to flow automatically from JIRA into Accelo. This means developers can log time against Accelo Projects, Milestones, Tickets and Retainers without having to leave JIRA, and ensures changes to the estimated time remaining updates the remaining time in Accelo, so that project managers can be confident the work they see as outstanding is the real deal.
The other big change is that now, the linking process will happen inside JIRA, thanks to a new Chrome Extension. With this improvement, anyone creating (or editing) a JIRA ticket will be able to quickly search for the client Project, Milestone, Ticket or Retainer that already lives in Accelo from inside JIRA, and when they save the JIRA issue, our integration will automatically create the matching Task inside Accelo.
We'll continue to sync all activities in Accelo with JIRA comments or Work Logs, which means your developers making comments or logging time will appear automatically in the Accelo Project, Milestone, Ticket or Retainer within minutes. Additionally, any activity created in Accelo (including those by clients or Accelo users who don’t have JIRA accounts) will be created as comments or work logs in JIRA so that your developers will always have a clear view into what’s going on with their issues.
This new and improved integration will empower project managers with the knowledge and visibility they need across their projects to make decisions about utilization and forecasting with confidence while giving developers the freedom to live and do all of their work in JIRA knowing their time is accounted for automatically. Before Accelo can launch this new and improved integration, we need to complete a beta period. That means that not all the bells, whistles, and capabilities are fully there yet, so this beta won’t support multiple Accelo tickets to a single JIRA issue, nor will you be able to relocate or edit multiple objects just yet.
If you’d like to join the beta, fill in the form below. We’re really excited for you to test it out and get a polished version very soon :-).
