JIRA – Issue tracking integration

TL;DR

We have just added support to the Website Checker for integration with the JIRA Issue Tracking and Project Management tool from Atlassian. If a report falls below the score limits you set as issue is raised in JIRA in the specific Project you picked, complete with a link back to the report.

What is an issue?

Atlassian explain this quite nicely on one of their help pages but basically it’s like a ‘ticket’ in an old support system, it’s a call to action to either fix or address a specific issue (hence the name) and makes it easy to keep track of all things that happen around said issue (like who needs to work on it, the time taken, any additional work required, etc).

Depending on the project this can become quite an involved process and the issue acts as the ‘hub’ around which all interrelated work occurs.

How does this help me?

By integrating with JIRA we provide a more formal & direct mechanism to addressing issues discovered on a website. In this way the information on what needs doing isn’t lost or misplaced – it’s right there in JIRA to be analysed and worked on. Plus if you provide professional support for a website, you can use the scheduling service in the Website Checker to provide regular ‘spot checks’ on a website and raise an issue as soon as something goes wrong. This saves time and improves end site quality.

For instance it could be that an update is pushed out to your website and the website checker runs across your website and finds out that suddenly the page weight has grown enough to impact the performance score – end result a JIRA issue is raised and the report generated contains all the information needed (including a HAR dump) to allow the website developers to get right to the numb of the problem and fix it. You don’t have to lift a finger, JIRA and the website checker work together to do the heavy lifting.

Cool! How do I set this up?

First off you need to have a Standard subscription to the Website Checker to use this. You will also need an instance of JIRA to be set up and available from the Internet (so we can call its API) – we suggest the cloud hosted solution Atlassian provide (BTW its free to start with).

Once you have your subscription set up and JIRA up and running, do the following:

  1. Log onto your account on the Website Checker. You will see an ‘Advanced Settings’ bar, click on the arrow on the right hand end to open it.
  2. You will now see three fields you need to fill in:
    1. JIRA Sitename – this is the full sitename of your JIRA instance, so for the cloud hosted version this will be something like mycompany.atlassian.com
    2. JIRA Username – this is the username we log into JIRA as, we suggest you set up an account specifically for this (although the admin will work fine). Note: this is not your email address!
    3. JIRA Password – this is the password for the JIRA account we will use. Note: All comms between us and the JIRA instance is via HTTPS – so passwords and other information cannot be ‘seen’ going over the Internet.
  3. Now once you have filled these in, do Ctrl+R (reload), you should see the JIRA Access Validated field change to Yes from No to show you got the details correct. Congrats!
  4. Now generate a report for the website you want to run tests against, this set up the website domain record in the Website Checker. You can do this using the generate report form at the bottom of your account home page.
  5. Once you have the report, visit your account home page and click on the entry for the website in question.
  6. On the website domain screen, again click on the arrow on the ‘Advanced Settings’ bar, this will show the settings just for that website
  7. Now per score category set the level below which an issue will be triggered. Setting a score level to zero will disable that check. They all default to 60 as a ‘base level’, setting it higher will raise the quality bar for that particular quality (so if you really care about performance raise it to 75).
  8. Now set the Project in which the issues will be raised (so if you have a project per website, set this up in JIRA before hand).

Now you are done! Any reports generated for that website will be checked against the score levels and if any go under an issue will be raised in JIRA. Combine this will the scheduling service (see the Advanced Settings in the website domain screen) and you have monitoring of your website quality tied right into your work processes!

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Keith

Director at Aykira Pty Ltd
Keith is a founder of Aykira & has over 18 years experience with everything Internet. From eCommerce to security, mobile to maps; large or small. PhD in Info Systems, member Australian & British Computer Society's, ex Yahoo. Architect/Engineer/Innovator.