Context

Jira is certainly a very important tool in the corporate toolbox world, but it’s not the only one.

Small, medium, and large enterprises almost always interact with all sorts of third-party tools from different companies or even with in-house-developed proprietary apps and databases, which may serve different purposes such as CRM, Identity Provider, various databases, etc.

Integrating these tools with Jira is essential for the success of your projects managed by Jira as it would allow you to have access to existing data without having to duplicate it inside of Jira - which would not even be a feasible option since that data most likely changes enough time that you would not be able to keep up with it as a Jira admin.

The Problem

The experience of bringing external data into Jira must be seamless to the user. However, all existing solutions from third-party plugins out there can only offer this integration with external data to be displayed as a separate panel inside of a Jira ticket. The lack of ability to see these external data fields integrated with your own fields cause a major disruption in the user workflow by forcing the user to go somewhere else and click away a few times in order to see that data, proving itself to be almost useless.

Imagine you are creating a Jira ticket and need to pull a list of customers from an external database (such as a CRM tool, for instance) into your Jira using a dropdown/single select list field. Once you select your customer, a new dropdown named “Customer Location” would dynamically load with options from your external source and display specific location options for the customer previously selected. Ultimately, after selecting a location from the dropdown, you’d like to see the customer’s account number so that information can be saved along with other information in your ticket. Simple enough, right?

So you basically have 3 dropdowns: Customer, Customer Location, Account #.

Picture these fields being displayed in the main content area of your ticket, and how you can actually customize their position and how seamless they integrate with the other custom fields you have in your form.

It sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, that’s not how the existing Atlassian Market Place third-party plugins actually work.

Going back to my example, if you are using one of these paid plugins you will have to design your ticket in such a way that:

1. The external data fields cannot be on the Create Screen if you are using Jira Software

1. To select data from these external data fields, you’ll have to select the plugin’s name from a side-panel in Jira, which will switch to another side-panel screen with your external fields, then you’ll have to click on “Edit” to finally be able to make your customer and customer location selections to finally be able to see the customer account number and save that information in your ticket.

How disruptive is that?!

Not to mention that in this use case, you want your ticket to be driven by the customer name, which must be selected as one of the first steps during the ticket creation process. All the other information your users will be entering is related to that customer, so it makes sense it would display at the top of the main content area of your ticket, correct?

Well, both goals are defeated here with these plugins - first because the customer can only be selected after the ticket is created (remember how these side-panel plugins do not display on the Create screen). Secondly, navigating to the side panel to get your external data after ticket creation is very disruptive to your workflow - it should in the beginning, not at the end of the process.

How to Solve the Problem

A picture is worth a thousand words in this case. Let’s take a look at what it would like to create a Single Select list field in Jira with external data integration capability - all natively created and configured in Jira:

Final Result in Jira Ticket