Optimize DevOps Workflow With Jira Git Integration

In the highly competitive market era, it is critical to use the agile development philosophy. Right now, DevOps provides a combination of philosophies, tools, and practices that evolves into a seamless, fast delivery of applications and services to the market. DevOps agile teams rely heavily on sound project management and version control system to succeed. And that’s where Jira, a modern project management software, and Git, a renowned source control software, come in.

This article will teach us how to optimize DevOps workflow with a Smart Git Integration for Jira.

Software Development Life Cycle(SDLC) offers the process guidelines for developing high-quality modern software. SDLC phases including:

• Requirement analysis
• Planning
• Software design
• Software development
• Testing
• Deployment

There are various SDLC models. However, in this post, we’ll focus on two SDLC models: The Waterfall and the Agile SLDC model.

The waterfall model is a sequential linear model, i.e., it only moves to the next phase once the previous one is finished. This makes it very slow and impractical as it lacks flexibility, considering it is impossible to predict all requirements upfront. However, the waterfall model is a good fit for projects with stable requirements that don’t change with time.

On the other hand, the agile model method solves the problem by enabling teams to do sprints, work on a larger project in smaller cycles, and introduce continuous iterations to testing and development throughout the whole project lifecycle. The key here is to create a minimum valuable product that is presentable to end-users and stakeholders.

In return, agile teams can get regular feedback from stakeholders and end-users and use it to improve the product. However, even the agile method is imperfect as it lacks the much-needed collaboration between Operations Engineers and Developers, slowing down the whole development process.

To streamline the need to plan, design, create and deploy your project, you need JIRA and GIT working in tandem, enabling project and program managers to take feedback and implement it on the go. Using a centralized JIRA platform ensures that the product is released through a pipeline and has tools and processes to get feedback from end-users and stakeholders.

This leads to DevOps, where Operations engineers and Developers are part of one team and work towards continuous software delivery.

DevOps is all about pushing practices to the limit. It requires teams to build together so that products can be launched at hypervelocity. Here, the key aspect is that no team is siloed. That’s why you’ll see a single BIG team consisting of developers and operations engineers working across the entire application lifecycle. In the end, teams can push development speed resulting in a shorter development cycle while maintaining software quality.

To truly understand DevOps, we need to understand the DevOps lifecycle. The DevOps lifecycle consists of the following phases:

• Continuous development
• Continuous testing
• Continuous integration
• Continuous deployment
• Continuous monitoring

Starting the continuous development phase involves coding and planning the software. As everything is agile, developers decide on the software vision and start product coding immediately. For continuous development, developers can choose their own set of tools. For example, they can use any version control tool for managing the code.

Next comes continuous testing. Here, developers keep testing the product for bugs. To ensure efficiency during testing, teams deploy testing automation tools such as JUnit, Selenium, etc. These automation tools let developers run multiple test cases at any given time.

In continuous integration, teams focus on frequently adding source code changes. In this phase, the code goes through both unit and integration testing. Teams also focus on code review and packaging. This means a high-quality code release that adds new functionality to the product or fixes a bug(s). To achieve continuous integrations, the DevOps team use tools such as Jenkins, which fetches code from the Git repository and prepares the build around it.

The next phase is continuous deployment. In this phase, the code is deployed to production servers. Tools such as containerization tools and configuration management are used to achieve continuous deployment. Here, configuration management ensures the application’s performance and functional requirements. In other words, this ensures server deployments, configuration consistency across servers, and scheduling updates. Some popular tools include SaltStack and Ansible. As for containerization, a tool such as Docker ensures consistency across deployment environments. It is also critical to create a non-failure environment and remove any scope of bugs/errors.

With deployment done, teams need to monitor application performance continuously. In the Continuous monitoring phase, critical software data is recorded and analyzed to see if it works properly. Tools such as ELK Stack, New Relic, etc., let teams analyze and monitor bugs.

As you can notice, teams constantly need access to project source code for continuous development, testing, integration, deployment, and monitoring. So, a version control system such as Git can be handy for DevOps. Git enables teams to work remotely in a distributed environment where every engineer has a role at every stage of development, testing, integration, and deployment. It also eases communication between operations and the development team.

On the other hand, developers also benefit as they can communicate better about changes within the project. For example, they can use Commit messages to communicate what they’re working on or what changes they have made. Regardless, developers can always choose the stable code branch to make changes if something goes wrong.

Git enables DevOps to stay operational, considering that engineers can access code anytime. Developers are also not afraid to do experiments as stable code is always accessible. And, Git is a perfect choice as it facilitates optimal DevOps operations.

DevOps need a feature-rich project management tool to succeed. That’s where Jira, a product of Atlassian, comes in. It started as a bug tracking platform but later became a fully-featured agile project management solution. Currently, it is used by more than 180K+ customers across 190 countries.

Jira is a popular agile project management software that supports any agile project methodology, including kanban and scrum. As a project manager, finding a tool that lets you manage your agile software development from one place is vital. This includes planning, tracking, and managing different agile tasks while running scrum to fast-track software development.

Jira’s feature set makes it ideal for agile project management. Some of its notable features include:

• Support for scrum boards and kanban agile boards
• Complete support for Git or other popular version control system
• Get complete visibility and sync teams with roadmaps
• Get insightful reports to learn about critical issues and their context
• Supports customizable workflows
• Supports 3000+ apps and integrations
• Offers drag-and-drop automation

Jira supports DevOps from the onset. From the start, developers can plan the product features and add team members to start developing the product. Jira’s collaborative feature means everyone is on the same page and gets updates using agile boards such as Scrum and Kanban.

Apart from the collaborative feature, teams can also estimate the time required to complete a feature or fix a bug. This can be managed through Roadmaps where everything is organized and synchronized. Additionally, businesses have complete flexibility in what they do. For example, they can have customizable workflows or assign a specific team for the project.

Using Jira for DevOps also brings additional benefits, including:

• Running daily scrumps or stand-ups.
• Track and manage sprints with sprint permissions, custom issue types, release hubs, and workflows.
• Get insights from the burndown chart on the project work.
• Understand your project better with sprint reports, velocity charts, release burndown, control chart, epic burndown, and cumulative flow diagrams.

In short, Jira offers everything you need to run DevOps projects. You may also want to check out Atlassian Open DevOps, which offers a complete package for DevOps teams.

DevOps is an aggressive take on agile methodology. It changes how teams work under an umbrella and almost every aspect of software development, including development, integration, testing, deployment, and monitoring. To manage all of these, you need an agile project management solution where the development team works in tandem with operations teams. It solves DevOp's need for a centralized place of action from where everyone is on the same page. It can show CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) pipelines on dashboards and roadmaps.

Take quality assurance, for example. In a well-established DevOps project using CI/CD pipelines, QA knows about the present status of any task through the dashboard. They can see if a task is completed or require their attention. Developers also benefit as they can deploy the completed modules tested by the QA team from a centralized information section. So, suppose the process is not taken through JIRA or a project management solution. In that case, developers can miss if the testing is done or not and forget to deploy the code or vice-versa. This can lead to time loss and miscommunication.

If you use Jira, you can link Git Repositories with Jira issues to provide seamless information to engineers without the need to leave the platform.

By integrating DevOps with Agile Project Management, the teams get the following benefits:

• Improved teamwork flow
• Implement DevOps lifecycle with consistency
• Fewer bugs and risks
• Streamline release process
• Increased visibility
• Higher user satisfaction
• QA in each phase leads to the better quality end product
• Decreased bottlenecks across the workflow
• Sticking to project deadlines

In short, DevOps brings testing and deployment to each phase of software development. In contrast, Agile brings an interactive development philosophy to the whole process.

In this section, we’ll look closely at Git Jira integration in action using the Smart Git Integration for Jira app from Alpha Serve. It is a feature-rich Jira Git integration that lets you fetch vital information and showcase it within Jira. This way, you don’t have to leave Jira to manage your Git projects.

Add any of Git providers and easily set up Jira GitHub integration or Jira GitLab integration, as well as other Jira integrations with Bitbucket, Microsoft Azure DevOps VSTS/TFS, Beanstalk, Gitee, Gitea, SSH, HTTP/HTTPS.

You can integrate more than one Git service in a single Jira instance.

Increase the development cycle speed as Smart Jira Git integration clones your repo and analyzes information locally instead of sending requests slowly to Git Provider API or receiving webhooks.

At the same time, Smart Git Integration for Jira app can automatically match Git branches with the relevant Jira issues.

Using such integration allows the team to distribute their work correctly when PM is working in Jira only, the developers work in their Git environment and just create the task with the same name as the issue key. Thus, they do not switch to Jira, but all of them see it linked correctly in both systems with the help of the plugin.

Get full control of the issue progress and expand the standard Jira issue page with Jira Git plugin, where all information about commits and branches, merge branches info can be easily found on Issue side panel with direct links to Git Provider site.

Smart Git Integration for Jira expands the standard Jira Cloud Issue page by adding more elements, such as Git Status side panel and Commits Issue tab panel.

Jira Git integration can be of great help for development projects managed in Jira. Let’s investigate the exact use case that is happening in any software development team as a part of daily work.

After receiving input from the user or a customer support team, the project manager has created an issue in Jira for a certain bug fix or product feature with a detailed description:

When the developer starts working on this issue, he/she creates a branch with the name containing issue key - “feature/CC-6” as shown in this example:

Thanks to the same issue key name used in the Jira issue and Git commit name, Smart Git Integration for Jira app easily linked this commit to the needed Jira issue. By this, the project manager, as well as the whole development team, can easily track the issue progress directly from Jira (such as branches’ update time, repository status, actions, history etc):

Moreover, our Jira Git plugin allows to setup automation, and in this case, the issue status will be changed automatically according to the predefined workflow:

Such a setup allows keeping the main focus of every team member on his/her daily work, not spending time on administrative tasks.

Undoubtedly, DevOps can benefit immensely from Smart Git Integration for Jira. It solves the communication gap between team members and engineers. It provides everyone a centralized place to get updates on every project move. The integration also brings necessary information to Issues where you can see the commit difference and sort branches based on different categories. If you find this article useful, share it and add your thoughts about DevOps workflow and its optimization with Smart Git Integration.