Show Jira descriptions and comments in Confluence

[Stuart Rolland]

Sometimes our JIRA tickets have some good nuggets of information that we'd like to search for and find in Confluence. However if it's a case of copying and pasting into Confluence some folks won't find the time to do it. Is there an easy way to post info from JIRA into Confluence, or maybe to tag an issue as 'documentation worthy' and have it show up in Confluence automatically?

[Heth Siemer · Accepted solution]

The Jira Filter macro allows you to display information from a Jira Filter. Atlassian has a YouTube video about it! Comments are a little more difficult, so we use a plugin called CCC Last Comment to assist with this. 

[Thomas Bowskill · Accepted solution]

Many thoughts on this one @Stuart Rolland

As @Heth Siemer pointed out, there is the Jira Filter macro, which would bring your tickets into your Confluence. You'd need to devise some criteria for your filters (if you're using Applications/Software and Components then that will help with filtering), and probably incorporate labels to identify what is 'documentation worthy' (Valiantys has a blog that expands on labels a bit). Alternatively, you could use an issue type, but that has a lot more overheads than labels.

Personally, I'm an advocate of pushing things to a single source of truth in terms of documentation. If we uncover valuable information when working on a ticket, we add it to the appropriate Confluence page (be it for applications, technical jobs, processes), as it reduces the complexity of finding and maintaining information (part of the information in a Jira ticket might be invalidated by another one, so you have to sew things together).

I have documentation pages for our core applications and jobs, which are all listed in our Insight Asset management plugin (recently acquired by Atlassian), and I use a page template for these that pulls data from Insight, as well as a Jira filter macro that shows a two-dimensional summary of issue type and status for any Jira ticket that has been tagged with the application/job within the last 12 months. Any substantiate information about the app/job lives in the Confluence page, the cursory information (criticality, owner) is in Insight (but included on the Confluence page via aforementioned macro), and the Jira filter is used to provide context on what has happened recently. It took a while for the team to be into the habit of maintaining this, but ultimately the value of having a clear structure with easier-to-access information has sold people on it.

TBH, a lot of this will depend on how you use Jira and Confluence -- each organisation seems to vary on what level of documentation exists in what product, so what I do might be irrelevant to you -- as well as the enthusiasm people have for spending the extra time to document something so that future time can be saved.

I hope this helps at least in some degree! :)

[Stuart Rolland]

Thanks for the reply, yes I am hoping to have a "single source of truth" or maybe even a search that spans both JIRA and Confluence. Does that exist?

[Sean Blezard]

It’s such a glaring omission to not have a comments macro out of the box - creating confluence reports for key strategic initiatives etc. 

Atlassian has made such a “not quite perfect” effort to integrate its two flag ship products.

[William Wilson]

Sean,

I believe, if you look closely, you will see that, shortly after they introduced the 'marketplace', they stopped efforts to integrate them. They focused on a cloud-first approach, and have been using the community to generate additional revenue through the marketplace by doing things like, removing features (table borders), preferring to have basic features become 'paid' features. 

At this point, if it's a principle feature, and it's not immediately available, you can count on being able to find a solution in the marketplace... for a yearly upcharge.

Point in case: "Comments are a little more difficult, so we use a plugin called CCC Last Comment to assist with this."... Which, for me, is ONLY an ADDITIONAL $1k/year. An additional $1k a year, to be able to see Atlassian Jira comments...  in Atlassian Confluence. 

Makes perfect sense!