How to seamlessly integrate Trello with Jira

[#1]

Communication is the key to success. However, to make it so, we need to guarantee seamless flow of information both inside and outside the company. Surely, no one's eager to give access to project management tools to unauthorized people, who may move, edit or delete something unintentionally. Even though there are permissions and other settings to prevent that from happening, sometimes s#!t happens and even those fail. That's why for companies which use Jira to manage complex development projects and Trello for non-technical purposes, the best possible option is to integrate both tools.

Why integrate Trello with Jira

While Trello provides something many non-technical teams have been looking for - a simple interface combined with maximum functionality, Jira empowers technical teams in driving development process. Consequently, such division in project management tools may result in a poor communication inside as well as outside the companies, limiting the knowledge of both colleagues from other departments and external customers about what's going on in the technical teams. And, as we've already mentioned at the beginning, communication is the key to success. So, how integrating Trello with Jira can help with that?

Share your roadmap with customers and stakeholders

Frequently, we need to share the progress of our work with external stakeholders or even our customers to let them know what's in our plans in the foreseeable future or what feature or app we're currently developing. We store most of such information in Jira on roadmaps, Scrum or Kanban boards, usually divided into multiple pieces assigned to various team members. Integrating Jira with Trello, though, enables us to synchronize all the important details from Jira projects to Trello boards. Thanks to this, we can present the roadmap of the project in a clear and interesting way to our customers, especially when working on a custom app or feature proposed by them.

Synchronizing Jira with Trello gives us a chance to present complex projects in a clear roadmap

Teams unite!

Usually, teams are divided when it comes to which department uses what project management tool. Unlike development teams which tend to go for more complex software like Jira, other departments often choose more intuitive tools like Trello to manage their projects. This may result in poor or even lack of communication, limiting insight into what teams using Jira are up to and vice versa. Flawless synchronization between Jira issues and Trello cards enables swift communication between all the teams, guarantees transparency and being up-to-date with what's on other departments' agenda, as well as manage our Jira issues on Trello boards. 

Gather feedback and ideas

Most IT companies focus on addressing people's basic needs either connected to their work or their private life. That's why IT is an industry that likes gathering ideas from customers. To do it, we can use either project management tools like Trello to make the boards public or create a dedicated request type in Jira Service Desk.  So, we don't have to call each of our clients, send e-mails or surveys to ask what they need most. We need to create a public Trello board, enable anyone to add cards, synchronize it with our Jira, so that each feature request automatically gets to the support or even development team. 

How to connect Jira projects with Trello boards

Seeing as integrating Jira with Trello gives many benefits, it's no surprise that there are so many tools dedicated solely to that. Even though focused on the same functionality, each app offers different capabilities to do it. For example, Trello Sync for Jira gives us the possibility to seamlessly connect Jira with Trello in any direction directly from the side menu in our Jira project, because Jira admins can enable Project admins to do it by selecting which types of synchronization will be visible for them.

One-way synchronization

Connecting Jira with Trello one-way is a good choice when we don't want to give access to our Jira instances to unauthorized people like our customers or stakeholders, but we still want to gather some feedback or share our plans with them. Depending on our needs, we can either choose to set an outgoing synchronization to create Trello cards from Jira issues or vice versa - an incoming synchronization to create Jira issues from Trello cards. To configure outgoing synchronization, we need to: 

1. On the configuration screen, provide link to the Trello Board we want to synchronize with Jira project.
2. Provide Trello board's credentials from Developer API Keys by Trello.
3. Choose Outgoing option and select Jira fields we want to synchronize with Trello cards.
4. Select where we want to copy Jira issues: 
   1. List by issue type creates separate Trello list for each issue type;
   2. List by issue status does the same as previous one, but for each issue status;
   3. Selected Trello list copies issues to the existing Trello list.
5. Click Finish to set up the connection. 

When configuring the incoming synchronization, we only need to follow the first three steps and choose Incoming option. 

Two-way synchronization

To make it easier for our teams to stay up-to-date with what's going on in other departments, we should go for two-way synchronization. This option enables to copy Jira issues to Trello cards and vice-versa and sync them each time there's any update. The configuration looks just like setting up the outgoing integration, but at the third step we need to choose Two-way and select Jira issue type we want to copy all Trello cards to.

Map full details from Jira issues to Trello cards

For one thing, integrating Jira projects with Trello boards really enhances cross-team collaboration. With tools like Trello Sync for Jira, we can effortlessly synchronize all the important details like summaries, descriptions, labels, attachments, issue keys, priorities, comments, and more from Jira issues to Trello cards. We won't event break a sweat worrying if we selected all important data to synchronize, because we can easily edit the connection later on and change whatever we need. 

If you’d like to learn more about Jira Software, read more  on the subject on the Community:

• How to work faster and easier in Jira Software
• Enhancing teams' agility with user story templates in Jira
• 4 little tricks to enhance Jira workflow with LDAP data

[Marianne Miller]

This is very helpful information!  We are preparing for a Jira Cloud migration and have units that love Trello.  This may be the solution we are looking for to bring us closer together!.  Thank you for a well written article!

[Karolina Lasoń [Deviniti]]

 Hi @Marianne Miller 

Great to hear this! Though, Trello Sync for Jira is only available on Server. So, you wouldn't be able to use it on your Cloud instances. 

However, there's this other app called: Trello Power-up | Jira. I think you should check it out, maybe it will also fit your needs. 

Cheers,

Karolina

[Stephanie]

Thanks nice informination! Overall I really enjoyed using Trello. I think this software is great for smaller companies. When I did use it, I was in a company of a little over 30 people. I'm not sure how it would work with a larger company but I do like a lot of the functionality and features they have to offer compared to others. I also tried zentao.pm , I like Zentao as there are many features included in the free plan.

[Lachlan Macnish]

Nooooooooo. You deprecated this plug-in! Why! :-(