GitLab and Jira Integration: Do You Need a Custom or Out-of-the-box Solution?

GitLab+Jira integration leverages the overall functionality of the ecosystem and improves the development workflow, making the development team’s work easier and faster. Having these two integrated can help you keep track of commitments and meet compliance requirements much more effortlessly while reducing the dependency on manual communication to update cross-functional teams.

Today’s software development industry represents a multi-tool ecosystem loaded with work management systems and issue trackers necessary for a software development team to keep tabs of their tasks.

The right choice of systems and effective collaboration between cross-functional teams is a challenge many businesses face as these things can impact a team’s productivity and decision-making process.

Platform integration is a general tendency in the IT domain, as businesses want to get a seamless work experience with essential tools. If you manage several projects using different platforms or need to get synced with another software development team, their integration can bring many benefits.

WHY INTEGRATE JIRA WITH GITLAB?
GitLab and Jira are the most common applications IT companies use daily to run their projects. Both those apps are excellent tools for managing projects. However, each has its own features with benefits and drawbacks. With these two systems connected, you can close the gap between project managers and developers, and your teams can work in harmony and optimize their workflows without interfering with each other’s autonomy or security.

WHAT IS JIRA?
Jira is a proprietary project management product by Atlassian that also tracks bugs and issues. It is a perfect tool for teams to create, track and prioritize tasks. Originally designed as a bug and issue tracker, Jira has evolved into a powerful work management tool for all kinds of use cases, from requirements and test case management to agile software development.

MORE ON TOPIC: What Is Jira Integration

WHAT IS GITLAB?
GitLab is the DevOps platform of choice for many developers that helps them with code management. It combines the ability to develop, secure and operate software in a single application. GitLab uniquely creates a streamlined software workflow, freeing your organization from the constraints of a pieced-together tool.

Together they bring planning and development under one roof to connect teams, improve visibility and ultimately reduce time.

GITLAB/JIRA INTEGRATION BENEFITS
Cprime brings together GitLab and Atlassian Technology to accelerate the software delivery process and meet organizational business objectives faster. When you integrate Jira with GitLab, you increase operational efficiencies, deliver better products quicker and reduce security risks. Also, GitLab and Jira combining helps you ensure the top performance of your software development team and DevOps.

Let’s have a closer look at GitLab-Jira integration benefits at different levels of your business.

GITLAB TO JIRA INTEGRATION BENEFITS FOR AN ENTERPRISE
Shorter delivery lifecycle, streamlined manual processes and improved performance of the software development team
Keeps technology complexity to a minimum
Keeps your data where you want it (on-premises or in the cloud)
You get full visibility into software development pipelines – your managers track commit volume, commit trends and changes to commit files in real-time; commits are authenticated to make sure each commit is happening against a scheduled and open work item.
You get acceleration in time to value
BENEFITS OF INTEGRATION FOR GITLAB AND JIRA USERS:
One GitLab project integrates with all the Jira projects in a single Jira instance – GitLab users can trace back commit to its respective work item at any given point in time from GitLab itself, and Jira users can trace into source code from Jira
You can quickly navigate to Jira issues from GitLab by accessing Jira Board View inside GitLab to keep them from jumping around
You can pass build information from GitLab to Jira at checkpoints to ensure that users/developers don’t miss any mandatory steps while committing
Display GitLab Deployment info inside Jira with no manual intervention required to close work items in Jira after a successful commit in GitLab
Detect and link to Jira issues from GitLab commits and merge requests and create Jira Issues from Unresolved Merge Request threads
Log GitLab events in the associated Jira issue
Create Jira issues from GitLab
Create a GitLab branch from a Jira Issue
Display feature flag info
Add comment integrations
Common challenges businesses face in GitLab Jira integration

About 70% of digital transformations fail due to complexity, bottlenecks and inefficient use of numerous management tools. Of course, businesses that require custom GitJab/Jira integration might have different problems in the transformation process, but there are a few issues in common.

Poor collaboration and communication hamper the transformation process as well as the lack of visibility and traceability. The most time-consuming task of the integration process is to find out how the systems that are being integrated are built and used.

All products are developed by development teams with a unique vision of the process, product logic and architecture. All systems evolve at their own pace being in style with an eye on the target audience. That means you have to maintain the GitLab/Jira integration, make sure everything is synced with every new release, and that there are no bugs because some stuff used in the integration has disappeared or been modified.

Security risks and siloed innovation also can be obstacles to successful GitLab/Jira integration. To align the business on the challenges and potential path forward, you need an accurate understanding of business needs and the knowledge of technology, tools and processes necessary for technology transformation. Every business is unique, and out-of-the-box tools may not meet every need, so it is reasonable to have a partner with such transformation opportunities.

USE CASE: CUSTOM GITLAB+JIRA INTEGRATION
Jira and GitLab are used in many different scenarios, and there are all sorts of cases where you would benefit from a GitLab+Jira integration. Here is a first-hand situation that can give you an idea of why it is necessary.

Problem statement: Vendors have their own APIs for their products and develop those APIs, depending on the needs of their target audience. For instance, a software development team has developed a connector for a software product of a vendor, but all of a sudden, that vendor requires particular changes when a new version of the API is about to be released.

Solution: Custom GitLab/Jira integration ensures that the team of developers and managers involved in the project have the same updated information on the APIs used by the vendor at the time and the APIs about to be released.

MORE ON TOPIC: API Integration Complete Guide

TO SUM UP
Connecting Jira and GitLab can give your teams a crucial edge over the competition. Whatever your need is – whether it is a more efficient use of both services with branch and merge strategies in a Jira and GitLab world or a wish to make your technology faster and easier with that integration – we can create a Jira/GitLab integration tailored for your company to help solve the challenges your company faces.

Bringing together these two powerful platforms can help teams on both sides – they will be able to work within their familiar systems and tools while having full visibility into the software development pipeline.

You may not fully understand how Jira and GitLab integrate, but we do! Contact our specialists for consultation and development.