📣 Announcing the Atlas for Jira Cloud integration

[#1]

Huge news: we just released an Atlas for Jira Cloud integration, available for admins to install on their Jira Cloud instance from the Atlassian Marketplace by a site admin

Following the introduction of the Work Tracking field in Atlas projects, with the Atlas for Jira Cloud integration, you can now connect an Atlas project to a Jira Cloud Software epic for a richer integration.

Link and sync epics and projects.

See Atlas project details inside Jira.

Help stakeholders get all the details.

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Last year, we shared our perspective on the relationship between Atlas and Jira, which still holds true. Whilst Jira is great for planning and communicating within a team, Atlas was created for higher-level communication between teams.

We built this integration to help teams use status updates as an input into planning, so manual duplication to keeping the title, dates and tags aligned or consuming a project’s latest update from Jira could be avoided.

Read more about the details of how to install the Atlas for Jira Cloud integration and what it can do here.

The Atlas for Jira Cloud integration has been a long-awaited feature from customers so we hope it lives up to the hype. We’re always listening to our users and find your feedback extremely valuable.

We look forward to seeing you give the Atlas for Jira Cloud integration a go and let us know what you think.

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FAQ

What versions of Jira does the Atlas for Jira Cloud integration support?

The Atlas for Jira Cloud integration is supported on Jira Software Cloud. Based on customer feedback, we will look to support products like Jira Work Management, Jira Service Management and Jira Product Discovery.

Can I link my Atlas project to an issue type other than epic?

Not yet. We recognise customers have different hierarchy models in their organisations and may want to map an Atlas project to a different issue type - we are currently exploring the ability to configure the integration to support more flexibility.

Can I link multiple Jira issues to my Atlas project?

The integration supports a 1:1 mapping between an Atlas project and a Jira Software epic for syncing. If you’d like to add more links to your Atlas project without syncing them, we recommend using the Related Links field.

[Colin Goudie]

Nice idea but pretty useless given the 1:1 relationship

Projects are bigger than Epics and often span multiple teams that might track in different Jira projects e.g. Front end/back end.

Please break this limitation. 

[Arnd Layer]

I agree with @Colin Goudie .

Either The link should be possible with most levels of the hierarchy in Jira: Epics, Jira projects and issue types that create the hierarchy in Advanced Roadmaps.

I think integrating with the Advanced Roadmaps hierarchy is even more important than linking to Jira projects.

Limiting the link to Epics just creates more limitations to how we can use Jira where Epics as the only issue types on this level is already a heavy linitation.

[Arnd Layer]

Also I'm pretty sure that only one Epic contributing to an Atlas project will not be feasible.

[Hans H]

I don't find this useless, but functionality does need to be expanded. I think the many-to-one request is an enhancement that would be nice, but would cause other issues in how you decide what is mapped from where.

@Rachel Lin the help article and this post doesn't make specifically clear what "target date" field you are using and syncing from the Jira side and I am seeing strange inconsistencies:

In this screenshot you can see that the sync process is showing that it is somehow getting Sept 11 as a target date from Jira, but Due Date on the Jira epic is actually blank. I also checked the Epic's "Target End" date field, and it is blank too. I don't know where this date is coming from. 

This doesn't affect me very much because the dates I'm going with are being sourced from Atlas anyway, but this was confusing for me when I was starting off.

[Michelle Grady]

I agree with the limitations of just linking epics. If a project for us is smaller and limited in scope, linking to an epic would be sufficient. If it spans across teams or has a few features, then linking to the initiative level that has multiple epics would be more accurate from a 1:1 ratio.

Additionally, the placement of the status is hidden when just in the sidebar. Perhaps we use more apps and cannot control the placement of where you see the Atlas status and additional information. I know other apps have a more prominent view in the main section of the ticket that might be helpful.

Example mockup:

[Hans H]

Agree with Michelle, above. I think if we have Atlas connected to an Epic, the Atlas information needs to be more prominent. It can't be hidden behind a click to show the Atlas side panel.

[Iain McCarthy]

Thanks for the update @Rachel Lin

Our project level planning is now happening predominantly in JPD, with multiple Epics under high-level ideas, so this would have max value for us if the linkage could be expanded to include that product.

For our use-case, it would be very, very rare than a single Epic would be sizeable enough in scope to justify an Atlas status stream. 

Would love to see this expanded! 

[Rachel Lin]

Hi everyone, Thanks for your feedback and hopefully you've got in there to give the integration a go anyway. 

We're listening and the ability to map to an issue type other than an epic is high up on our next steps for this feature. Please continue to be patient with us! 

To address the comment on wanting to link to multiple epics or issues, I think this comes back to the same desire to be able to map an Atlas project to a higher-level concept in Jira. We believe a 1:1 mapping is needed in order to determine which details to sync from, without things getting really messy and confusing. 

A more prominent placing to the status update would be super cool and definitely in our longer term vision. For the time being, we may be constrained by what we can do as a marketplace app but the intention is for Atlas to be more embedded into tools like Jira, Confluence, Trello etc. in the future. 

[Arnd Layer]

Let me add one more thig:

What will definitely irritate a lot of users is that "project" in Jira and in Atlas have a different meaning, which is made obvious when you are asked to create a 1:1 link between an Atlas project and a Jira epic which is one level below project in Jira.

[Marc Bailey]

It's understandable null hypothesis to link 1:1 to an Epic. It's equally understandable that an Atlas project (really need a better term than this) is likely something that might have Jira Project scope, or aggregate scope across multiple Jira Projects.

I think a reasonable compromise is to allow multiple Epic links as suggested by @Colin Goudie 

I also really like that Atlas copes with projects that don't happen to use Jira. Some of our less technical types run projects that are tracked in Confluence, or even just in Google Docs. Even though there's no syncing, it's so great to be able to amalgamate reporting in one place.

[Svein Inge Andersen]

The need for connecting Atlas with a higher level than an Epic is obvious, and I suspect that will be rolled out but under a Premium license ones we have gotten used to the free version ;-).