GitKraken today made available a preview of a free application that aggregates activity across Atlassian’s Jira Cloud and any Git repository to provide a unified view across all the activities of a software development team.
Adam Wride, general manager for planning solutions of GitKraken, said Team Insights for Jira (TIJ) will make it easier for DevOps teams, project managers and application stakeholders to collaborate.
TIJ accomplishes that goal by providing an overlay using a familiar Gannt chart view of epics and issues found in project management applications to correlate, for example, user activity such as status changes and comments made in Jira Cloud with updates to commits and pull requests made in a Git repository, he noted.
Team members can then filter those views by project, sprint, contributors, issue type and other criteria to drill down on the exact list of issues that need to be addressed, added Wride.
Most application development efforts rarely follow the original DevOps workflow plan, so TIJ provides a means for organizations to track real-time activity data to visualize how their efforts are progressing against the plan. That makes it possible to make data-driven decisions about how to reallocate resources as needed, said Wride.
At the core of TIJ is a Git Integration tool that GitKraken previously made available. TIJ is the second offering from the company based on that tool following the launch of an application that integrates Jira with continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms. GitKraken claimed there are already more than 10,000 organizations employing its Git integration tool.
As more organizations become dependent on software to drive a wide range of processes, the need for increased visibility into DevOps workflows has become more crucial. Revenue is now directly tied to the pace at which software is being deployed and updated. Any change to the pace at which an application is being developed needs to be communicated across all the stakeholders that might be impacted. The challenge is that given all the dependencies that exist within modern applications, it’s not always easy to discern how a delay in the development of one module or component might impact multiple application development projects.
Of course, project managers have been using project management applications to bring some order to the chaos of software development for decades. The challenge has always been that manual updates to projects have not always been provided in a timely manner. Developers don’t always remember to update project managers, who must manually enter updates in a project management application. GitKraken is making a case for an approach that automatically updates Jira Cloud by collecting data from DevOps tools and platforms rather than waiting for software engineers to remember to share that information with a project manager.
Arguably, there’s now no excuse for everyone in an organization—if they care to, they can find out the status of any application development initiative. The challenge is making sure the data that DevOps teams—and their tools and platforms—already generate seamlessly updates the project management software that everyone else relies on to keep track of those projects.
