Jira for agile project management

Jira was originally designed to be a bug and issue tracker, since its introduction in 2002. Evolving over years, it is now a comprehensive agile workflow management tool.

And today, Agile teams around the world lean towards Jira for its mature and customizable features.

78% of the project managers say that they use Jira to be the backbone of their planning, managing, tracking and reporting processes. The major unfavorable opinion is the Jira email notifications that come in with Jira updates.

Most of the users say they tend to miss on the critical issue updates as dozens of emails flow into their inbox each day. And this has had some impact on Sprint delivery, blockers and more.

And individually looking for those updates on your inbox can also demand some time in return.

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Do you miss critical Jira email notifications?

Let’s face it - During a busy workday, it is natural we pay less attention to our inbox, as we all receive dozens of emails, both necessary and irrelevant.

But some Jira email notifications are certainly more important than others, and missing them can really hurt your project's progress.

With the Jira email notifications continually filling up the inbox, we will have to figure out a way to deal with critical notifications.

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Slack for actionable notifications

Most teams have already moved to Slack for internal communication and collaboration. And bringing in notifications on the Slack channels means the entire team can actually see and use it, unlike email notifications that land on an individual's private inbox and go unseen.

If all you want is a simple actionable notification in Slack when some critical Jira updates are happening, then that is what we are going to talk about now.

And both Jira and Slack come with a powerful framework for app integrations with very rich interactions that can greatly improve on its functionality.

How Troopr helps?

We at Troopr, have built a solution around this and it’s a Slack Jira bot, that comes up with actionable notifications/alerts on your Slack channels when some important updates happen in Jira.

Troopr’s Slack Jira bot makes sure you don't miss on important notifications and get them delivered directly to your Slack channel.

The following are the key features:

1. Watch only specific events
2. Actionable Slack notifications in lieu of Jira emails
3. Personalized notifications
4. Grouped and paginated notifications
5. Quiet and unobtrusive mentions
6. Compacted to detailed templates
7. Connect to the teams where they are
8. “Pull” to catch up with issues

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Watch only specific events

It is overwhelming when the notifications that come in are not really what you are looking for at the moment. Troopr Jira Slack integration bot enables users to choose and specify the type of events they would like to see, thus improving focus on what actually requires attention.

Actionable Slack notifications in lieu of Jira emails

Ideally any Slack notification by Troopr is actionable and enables users to take any kind of Jira actions on the issues without leaving your Slack workspace, unlike the prime Jira emails that take the users to the Jira dashboard to complete the actions.

Personalized notifications

Troopr’s Slack Jira bot enables personalization of “What”,  “When” and “Where” to receive the notifications, both on personal and shared channels.

Users can customize their personal preferences in consideration with two key factors, the event types (Assigned to me, When I’m mentioned, updates to issues watched by me or custom) and delivery frequency.

Besides that, Troopr enables users to personalize their shared channel preferences based on projects, JQL, delivery frequency and event types. Some of the common event types the team actually likes to see are:

• Issue is created
• Comment is added
• Assignee is changed
• Issue is transitioned
• Priority is updated
• Issue is edited
• Sprint (started/closed)

The default delivery frequency is 1 minute, however users can schedule longer frequency cycles (upto 8 hours) or even choose real-time delivery.

All the notifications in the same delivery frequency are grouped and sent as “one notification” to the respective Slack channels. More on this in the next section.

Also, Troopr adds an unsubscription link on every personal and channel notifications, that allows easy and quicker switching off if users would like to disable some of the notifications.

Grouped and paginated notifications

Troopr ensures that only “one notification” is sent per delivery cycle. We take this seriously at Troopr, and don't want our notifications to look troublesome and disruptive. We do this by grouping and paginating the related Jira events happening in the same delivery cycle.

Multiple related Jira events happening in the same delivery frequency cycle are grouped into “one notification” Likewise, multiple notification events happening in the same delivery cycle are grouped into “one paginated notification message” before delivering them.

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Quiet and unobtrusive mentions

Likewise, (When I’m mentioned) event types happening in the same delivery frequency cycle are grouped into “one notification” and delivered to the user’s personal workspace and enables users to click on to the issue link and keep the discussion going.

Compacted to detailed templates

Troopr lets the users to choose from different notification formats, from compacted to detailed templates based on how they would like to see the notifications.

Connect to the team members where they are

Troopr allows users to get connected to their team on the platform where they are active. A typical user is signed in on Slack for almost 9 hours in a day.

Do you want to discuss something around a Jira issue?

Troopr Slack Jira bot enables users to initiate conversations around the Jira issues via a simple command. This finds and unfurls the issue on Slack channel open for discussion and allows team members to  take any Jira actions on the issues (Answering/Commenting/Priority change/Assignee change/status/more) directly from the Slack channel, thus keeping everyone on the same page.

“Pull” to catch up with issues

In addition to actionable notifications being automatically delivered to your Slack channels, Troopr also allows users to scan or catch up with the issue lists on a pull basis. A simple command “/troopr list” on your Slack workspace enables users to quickly scan and catch up with the issue lists that are based on some filters events say, assigned, mentioned,  watched, and more

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Getting started with Troopr

Some of the customers already using Troopr says “they love the notifications functionality”

Would you like to give it a try? Troopr’s Jira Slack integration bot is free to try and designed to fit teams of any size.

Get started by installing Troopr Slack Jira integration plugin from Slack app directory or Atlassian marketplace.

The complete integration process to connect Jira to Slack can be done in minutes. Read about it here.