How to Use Confluence with Jira — Best Use Cases

If you are adept with the agile method and work in both Jira and Confluence, why not bind these two powerful tools to get the best out of them? Integration will help your team to better organize work, deliver products faster or keep in touch with other company members and clients. Now, let’s see if it suits your needs.

Before exploring the best examples of how to use both products in conjunction, let’s see how they can in fact be integrated:

1. Install applications together. Deploy Jira and Confluence in independent Tomcat instances behind an Apache Web Server. Once done, use the hamburger menu to switch between tools.

2. Assign Confluence user management to Jira. This may be done during the Confluence installation or later if it is allowed by the product version. This will help to manage all users at a single location. You do not need to have equal licenses for both products.

3. Bind Confluence and Jira with an Application Link. Find application links in the administration panel (Settings > Products) and enter the URL for a new link. Opt for OAuth authentication for such kinds of links.

You may invent your own methods which suit your business and infrastructure, however, there are several options which may be helpful for any team.

In most cases Jira is used for managing work tasks, and Confluence is great at keeping project records, developing a knowledge base, sharing ideas, or scheduling.

Product integration will make you forget about using additional drives or applications to store documents, however, you will need to switch between Jira and Confluence every now and then.

Fortunately, shortcuts exist to ease cross-application navigation. Just Choose Projects, select the one that suits your purposes and click Add item. Drop the requested data and tap Add.

If you reside mainly in Confluence, it does not mean you should switch between the tools. You can update stakeholders, see notifications and updates within the interface of your regular tool. In other words, it is possible to show and draft Jira issues, reports and charts without exiting Confluence.

Want to have Jira issues at your fingertips when log in to Confluence? Simply open the corresponding page and enter the URL of the issue, filter or search results (to display multiple specific issues), and enjoy.

Otherwise, you can exploit Jira Issues macro. It is possible, if your Jira and Confluence are bound to each other with Application links. Go to + > Jira Issue/Filter from the upper toolbar and select an appropriate option. With this macro you can watch statuses of the tasks and decide on how to visualize and organize issues on the page. You can change macro settings whenever necessary.

You may also do the same with Confluence Page Gadget.

That's not all. Create Jira issues in the Confluence space. The first method is to use the portion of the text you want to turn into an issue. Highlight it and click on the appropriate icon that appears. Enter requested data and confirm. You can create multiple issues by using information in tabular format.

Alternatively, select Jira by tapping + on the toolbar. Enter required data and voilà. The issue will also be accessible from Jira.

Draft Jira reports and charts in the Confluence space. Simply decide what to communicate and use appropriate tools or templates (e.g. Jira Report blueprint, Jira Chart Macro or Jira Gadgets). Reports and charts will help to capture progress, track results or share ideas.

Confluence Jira integration will confer an advantage for specialized and special purpose teams as well.

For instance, software teams may use Jira in conjunction with Confluence to:

• Define requirements. Use a special template called Product Requirements blueprint to ensure a shared understanding of tasks amongst your team before kicking-off the project.
• Manage sprints. Add Confluence pages with requirements, specifications, insights, customer information and other useful documents to Jira projects for easy access during the work.

In turn, service desk teams may bind Confluence and Jira to develop and maintain a knowledge base. Use built-in blueprint and templates for self-help articles to provide useful insights to your team or clients. To make these data public, link your Jira project with appropriate Confluence space and provide access to it to all active users and customers.

While Jira is the best application to track all the work related to software development, Confluence helps to put in order useful work-related content. These tools complement each other and provide one powerful solution. Use them together to reduce switching between tools, organize, align and speed up work, ease communication with clients, constantly grow and improve.