🎉 Introducing deployment gating for GitHub in Jira Service Management

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Hey Atlassian Community!

👋 I’m @Prithwish Basu , and I’m a Senior Product Manager here on the Jira Service Management team at Atlassian.

I’m excited to meet everyone here in the community—and even more excited to share that GitHub deployment gating is now available for Jira Service Management Cloud Premium and Cloud Enterprise customers.

Now, developers can push deployments to Jira Service Management from GitHub for change control board approval, and track subsequent changes automatically in Jira Service Management—pushing changes live only when they’ve gotten the necessary approval.

Connecting work across development and IT Ops, this new functionality helps development teams using GitHub deliver to your customers faster, while letting IT teams curb risk by managing changes to your most critical environments.

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How it works: a closer look at the developer experience

When you enable this functionality, developers will be able to track deployments in Jira Service Management without taking any extra steps in GitHub. From a developer perspective, they’ll go through the same commit process as usual in GitHub:

Then, depending on the environment they make the commit for—and depending on the environments marked for manual approval—Jira Service Management will take one of two actions.

If the environment they’ve committed the changes for does not require manual approval, a change request is automatically be created in Jira Service Management, and then approved without intervention. From there, implementation begins immediately.

However, if the commit is in an environment that does require manual approval, the change request is still created automatically in Jira Service Management. But instead of moving to deployment, the change will freeze until it receives signoff from one of the chosen approvers for that environment.

If it gets approved, it’ll move forward to deployment, and update GitHub accordingly.

But what if the approver declines the change request? In that case, the deployment will fail, and the developer that made the commit will get notified in GitHub, along with a link to the change request so they can review details on which approver reviewed it, and any comments they made.

No matter the path it takes, developers are able to automatically track changes from GitHub in Jira Service Management to leave a clear record of changes without straying from their existing workflow. And on the flip side, IT gets clear visibility into what’s changed, and the ability to maintain oversight to critical systems.

Setting up GitHub deployment gating for your Jira Service Management project

Already using GitHub and interested in using deployment gating with Jira Service Management? Check out this support article we put together to take you through setup step-by-step.

Note: You’ll need to approve additional permissions in the Jira for GitHub app to use the deployment gating feature. If you’re already using the Jira for GitHub app but do not wish to use the deployment gating feature, it will continue to work without accepting the updated permissions.

If you get stuck, you can always come back to this thread so we can help point you in the right direction.

Thoughts & feedback

What do you think? We’d appreciate any thoughts you’re willing to share on this new functionality. Feel free to drop any questions or suggestions here, or submit it via our feedback portal.

Thank you!
The Jira Service Management team

[David Berclaz]

Thanks for sharing @Prithwish Basu 

I've been in contact with some organizations which had the need to also create the corresponding Jira versions and automatically update Jira versions (fixVersion field) of the related Jira tickets.

A solution for that is the Golive App that provide specific GitHub Actions. That way, Jira versions are automatically created (if they don't exist) and the Jira tickets have their fixVersion automatically filled in.

For more info, read this article (+ JiraCon video in the end):
Release Management in Jira: Best Practices

Cheers,

David