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If you’re working in the software industry, you might be familiar with Atlassian products like Jira, Confluence, Trello, Opsgenie, or Atlas. These products assist you in scaling your business operations by connecting your teams, tools, and data.
One of the most popular applications of Atlassian is Jira. Let’s look at how to integrate Jira into your system and test the integrations.
What is Jira?
Jira is a highly versatile tool developed by Atlassian that serves as a project management and issue-tracking platform, primarily targeting software development. Over the years, Jira has evolved to cater to a broader audience, including business, marketing, HR, and operations teams. It is one of the most popular tools for managing projects and workflows of various complexities and sizes.
Jira’s suite includes several specialized products to cater to different needs. You have Jira Software for agile project management tools, Jira Work Management, which is aimed at business teams (like marketing, HR, and finance) for task and project management, and Jira Service Management, which is tailored for IT operations and customer service teams, providing ITSM (IT Service Management) capabilities.
Customizing Jira products
Quite often than not, you might have to customize JIRA to tailor it to your needs. For this very purpose, the Atlassian Marketplace offers a plethora of apps, each of which serves to enhance the core capabilities of Jira or any other Atlassian product like Confluence.
Integrating Jira products into your business
You might be looking to make Atlassian products like Jira a part of your business in the following ways.
- Integrating Atlassian products into your application
- Creating apps to add to the Atlassian Marketplace (more on this below)
To integrate JIRA products into your business, you can use several programming languages, depending on the type of integration you aim for. The choice largely depends on how you plan to interact with JIRA, whether through its REST API, developing plugins, or using Atlassian Connect for cloud apps.
You have several options for integrating with JIRA Cloud products:
- REST API: This is the most common and flexible approach. You can use any programming language that supports making HTTP requests, such as Python, Java, JavaScript (Node.js), C#, etc.
- Atlassian Connect: Atlassian provides a framework specifically for building apps within the Atlassian ecosystem, including JIRA Cloud. Atlassian offers pre-built frameworks for Node.js (ACE) and Java (Spring Boot) to simplify development using Connect.
- Groovy: It is commonly used for scripting within JIRA, especially for JIRA Server or Data Center. It integrates with JIRA’s ScriptRunner plugin, allowing you to automate actions, customize behaviors, and extend JIRA’s capabilities without developing full-fledged plugins.
Building apps for Atlassian Marketplace
You can create apps for Atlassian to either solve a problem for your team or because you’re a software development enthusiast. Whatever the case, Atlassian provides specific tools to make this happen for you.
The best programming language for your Atlassian Marketplace app depends on the specific requirements of your app and your familiarity with the language. There are three main ways to develop cloud apps and integrations with Atlassian.
- Forge
- Connect
- External apps
Atlassian Forge
Forge is a newer framework designed to build cloud apps securely and easily on Atlassian’s platform. This serverless platform recommends Node.js for backend logic. You can use any language for the front end, but Atlassian provides UI kit components based on React.
Atlassian Connect
To develop cloud apps compatible with Jira Cloud, Confluence Cloud, etc., you can use any programming language to handle HTTP requests and create web services. Atlassian Connect offers more flexibility and allows you to use any language. If you are comfortable with Node.js or Java, then Atlassian provides optional frameworks to help you get started.
External apps
You can also build apps without Atlassian Connect or Forge. These apps can still access data and create content through the cloud product APIs. You can use any programming language compatible with your auth method.
Server-side apps
These are generally written in Java due to Atlassian’s internal architecture. Some apps also use Groovy for scripting.
For cloud apps, you have more flexibility in choosing a language, with JavaScript/Node.js being a common choice due to its widespread use in web development. For Server and Data Center apps, Java is the go-to language due to its direct support by the Atlassian SDK.
Once you’ve developed the app, you must test it before registering it on the Atlassian Marketplace. Your app must meet Atlassian’s security, privacy, and design guidelines. This includes passing a security assessment for cloud apps and adhering to Atlassian’s Marketplace Vendor Agreement and Partner Agreement, if applicable.
Testing apps and integrations for Jira products
Testing your code for Marketplace apps or custom integrations can be done at different levels through unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing.
Unit testing of Atlassian product integrations and apps
Unit testing involves testing the smallest parts of your application in isolation, like functions or methods, to ensure they work as expected. To write effective unit tests, focus on input validation, logic correctness, error handling, and mocking external dependencies.
Choose a testing framework compatible with the programming language you’re using. For JavaScript/Node.js, Jest or Mocha are popular choices. For Java, JUnit or TestNG are commonly used.
Integration testing of Atlassian product integrations and apps
After unit testing individual components, you need to integrate them and test them as a group. Integration testing checks how different parts of your application work together, from internal modules to external services and APIs. This helps identify issues in the interaction between components. Through integration testing, focus on API communication, data flow between components, event handling, and mocking complex interactions.
Use testing frameworks that support integration testing. For interactions with Atlassian products like Jira, consider using their REST APIs in your tests to simulate real-world scenarios. Tools like Postman or Rest-Assured for Java can be helpful for API testing.
Atlassian provides another framework for integration and functional testing. The Wired Test Framework is specific to Atlassian Server Apps, which are developed in Java and primarily used within Atlassian’s on-premises software like Jira Server. It’s not directly relevant to Forge or Atlassian Connect apps designed for the Atlassian Cloud platform.
This framework allows you to test your app’s behavior within the context of the host Atlassian product, eliminating the need for complex mocking frameworks. It uses JUnit annotations and builds upon it with some enhancements for wired testing.
End-to-end testing of Atlassian product integrations and apps
Finally, end-to-end testing tests your app in a setup that closely mimics the production environment, from the front end to the back end, including its integration with Atlassian products. The focus now shifts to user workflows, UI interactions, business logic flow, and testing against real Atlassian instances.
At this stage, you can decide to either opt for traditional, programming-based testing tools like Selenium or go for something more modern and codebase agnostic like testRigor.
testRigor for end-to-end testing
testRigor is a generative AI-based test automation tool that can make end-to-end testing very easy and efficient. It is agnostic of the programming language your app works on and only uses plain English language to create test cases. This means that anyone can easily participate in the testing process. With this ease of writing test cases, you can test your app on various platforms: web, mobile, and desktop.
login to JIRA as Admin //predefined rule select "Issues" from "Menu" click on "Add Custom Field" fill in details of custom field //predefined rule click on "Save"
You can automate almost any kind of end-to-end testing scenario, like those requiring 2-factor authentication, file testing, email testing, mobile testing, APIs, interactions with table data, and much more.
With this tool, you need not worry about test maintenance as testRigor uses AI and self-healing to make test maintenance and execution super easy. The tool even integrates with different tools and platforms, with a testRigor app already in the Atlassian Marketplace.
This means that you can not only use testRigor to test your Atlassian Marketplace app but also integrate it into your workflow like other Atlassian apps and use it for end-to-end testing of your product.
Though testRigor is primarily a cloud solution, there’s provision for on-premise solutions as well. You can read more about testRigor’s features here.
Conclusion
Jira’s strength lies in its versatility, extensive customization options, and robust integration capabilities. It is a go-to solution for teams looking to streamline their project management and issue-tracking processes. Whether for software development or broader project management needs, Jira provides the structure and flexibility to support teams in optimizing their workflows and improving productivity.
Through Atlassian’s tools and frameworks, you can create solutions that can help your team and other users. If you, too, intend to create such a solution, then be sure to use testing tools at various levels of testing to ensure that your app is of optimum quality.
