Imagine driving down the highway and seeming to get a traffic jam at a distance. You realize your car is equipped with GPS to have clear visibility into what’s next and can show exact directions for alternative routes and estimated travel time. It is very easy to pick the fastest and most favorable route to reach your destination by looking ahead proactively and having the set of right tools for collecting information.
The combination of Dev and Ops teams that are working together to build a faster and more reliable released pipeline is defined as DevOps. Similar to GPS, Jira Software acts as a singular source of truth for information development across your DevOps workflow.
Complete traceability and visibility of work across different teams can get you surface information and data from an integrated toolchain to the right people anytime. No matter if you’re a team lead, release manager or a tester, the workflow visibility can ensure everyone by letting them know what’s in development and what’s being supported.
In the latest release of Jira Software version 7.9, there is support added for the dev cycle to show development data from Bamboo, Bitbucket and GitHub in Jira Software search from your DevOps practice. It makes it a lot easier to identify development issues by making informed decisions and faster shipping with software development services.
Get Answers to Development Questions via Basic Searches
A new column called Development is added to the default view of Jira’s Issue Navigator in the latest release of Jira Software Server (v7.9). It allows viewing specified information pulled out from Bitbucket Server without clicking into the individual issue. Instead of limiting yourself to the single-issue information, you can see a high-level snapshot of issues coupled together by filtration, to help surface larger trends or problems.
If this gets stopped at their source, does it really need to move the needle for improving your dev process within DevOps? For instance, if you wish to know how many issues under development, are they in the review?
If you ever find that one or two developers are getting loaded down with the bulk of pull requests, you can immediately access if redistribution of work is required or not.
Filter Out Your Development Information Using JQL
What happens if you need to answer too many complex or open-ended questions? This can become monotonous after a time. You can use Jira Query Language (JQL) to create search queries that are based on development information to uncover key information for avoiding all pending problems.
The latest version of Jira Software Server comes updated with the syntax to align the JQL query formatting. The users of Jira Software power use JQL for a long time to look at a subset of issues for driving reports and focus on Scrum and Kanban boards. With the help of cross-reference data from developer tools, Jira Query Language seems to be more powerful now.
Examples of Jira Query Language in Action
The teams who practice DevOps need critical internal and customer feedback, which helps them to inform features by making them higher quality and more valuable to the end user. Hence, focusing on feedback often creates tension when you decide if the first version is ready to deploy.
You may ask: What number of issues are done but have not been deployed?
From this question, you can determine whether the feature is ready to be released and starts collecting feedback or is blocking any issues that need to get resolved prior to release.
Often, the team’s test builds locally before jumping off to deployment. If the same is the case for your team, then it is a good practice to regularly check the status of the builds.
You may ask: What number of issues are failing builds?
If you figure out a lot of failing builds, it may be a signal that the developer environments do not match the deployment. Generally, this is a problem you want to catch and fix right away, so conversely, the set of issues can be the areas where the testers can check acceptance criteria and begin exploratory testing.
Boost Up Your Search
You need to surface the information when and where it is needed as most of the teams get the most out of DevOps by bringing development, QA, high-quality releases, more-informed decisions and happy customers. Keep learning!
