Maintaining 2 projects

[Satish Kumar]

Within our instance of JIRA license, we are using 2 products:

1. Jira Service Management - For customer reporting issues/feedback

2. Standard Jira - For internal development and sprint management

When customer reports an issue using Jira Service Managment, it goes to a specific project (let's say project - SUPPORT) within standard JIRA which has license restriction of 15 users (agents). We manage another project (let's say project - DEV) in standard JIRA for our development/sprint management, which has over ~70+ users/dev/QAs/BAs/etc. 

The model we are using, we run JIRA automation rule to create duplicate ticket in project DEV every time a new ticket is logged in project SUPPORT and then we various other automation rules to keep the status/comment/workflow/etc. in sync between projects SUPPORT and DEV. This entire process very cumbersome and create nuances. 

Questions I have -

1. I believe this is not a very unique scenario and must be used across multiple teams. Is this a right approach of doing this? If not, can you please share links/references on the best practices to follow?

2. If this is a right and only approach, how can we synchronize assignee between SUPPORT and DEV projects considering license restriction? If I add ~70+ users to project SUPPORT, will it not increase our licensing cost?

Please advise!

[Vinubabu _Vinu_ · Accepted solution]

Hello @Satish Kumar 

Welcome to the community.

- To begin with, you are in the right approach. Genrally, JSM agents triage the requests and if a bug/incident qualifies for code fix, it is then routed to the Jira software board.

- Instead of duplicated your JSM incident to a Jira bug, you can focus your automation to create a linked bug and not a simple clone. Only share information that is required by the development team to fix the bug.

- From your question, I can see you already have setup 2-way automation to sync comments/status etc.

- Atlassian have themselves created some tips and tricks for this exact use case. Take a look at How Jira Service Management and Jira work together 

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ · Accepted solution]

Hey @Satish Kumar

welcome to the community also from my side.

I agree with @Vinubabu _Vinu_ that your approach is definitely an approach many people are using - there are some variations of it.

As Vinubabu's linked documentation points out, you can add everyone who has a standard Jira license as collaborators directly to the support project. So that they can directly write internal comments there, but they won't be able to comment publicly in the JSM project. That's the easiest approach with fewest overhead.

However, if you want to create a duplicate issue so that the support and development comments or actions are better separated, you need a mechanism for copying the ticket and keeping it in sync. If I understood you right, you have a setup with some automation rules which performs this task.
If you want to keep this approach, but get rid of maintaining all these automation rules, you could also get an issue sync app from the marketplace. These apps are built for that use case that you can define which issues you want to keep in sync, how you want to deal with comments or status updates, etc. I'm part of the team behind Backbone Issue Sync and we have a sample configuration guide for this scenario.

Coming back to your second question:

How can we synchronize assignee between SUPPORT and DEV projects?

Based on my tries and the error message I got, there's no way a user with a standard Jira license can be the actual assignee. What you can do is to create a custom field for the support project, e.g. "Dev Assignee" and keep that in sync with the assignee field from the dev project. That's what I've seen some of our customers doing and it worked quite well.

Cheers,
Matthias.

[Satish Kumar]

Thanks @Vinubabu _Vinu_ & @Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ for your valuable feedback. Let me take this back to my team and discuss it internally. 

[Mathieu Lepoutre _Exalate_]

Hi @Satish Kumar I work for Exalate.

Your setup with Jira Service Management (JSM) and Standard Jira is common, but manually duplicating tickets and using automation rules for synchronization can be cumbersome. Instead, a tool like Exalate can handle this bi-directional synchronization more efficiently, ensuring seamless updates between SUPPORT and DEV without the complexity of multiple automation rules

To address your questions:

1.While some teams use automation for syncing, best practices typically involve integration solutions like Exalate to avoid duplication overhead and maintain flexibility.

2.Synchronizing the assignee while maintaining license restrictions can be tricky. Instead of adding all users to SUPPORT (which would increase licensing costs), Exalate allows you to sync assignees dynamically without requiring them to be licensed in both projects.

[Bogna Krystian_Deviniti_]

Hi @Satish Kumar 

I work at the company that develops Issue Sync Pro 

This app could be helpful in your use case. IS Pro can automatically sync updates, comments, statuses, and other fields between SUPPORT (JSM) and DEV (Jira Software) without creating duplicate issues. You can configure rules to map assignees between the projects without needing to add all DEV users to SUPPORT. The app allows for bidirectional or unidirectional sync, meaning you can decide which updates flow between the projects.

This is a link to Issue Sync Pro Support Center where you can find an interactive tutorial, the app's documentation and other information 🚀