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How Jira Service Management and Jira Software work together

Meeples collaborating together using software

Overview

Jira Service Management and Jira Software are built on a common platform, so your development, operations, and IT teams can work together to quickly resolve requests. Service teams can link Jira Service Management tickets to issues in Jira Software so you can prioritize requests for development work. Developers can jump in and view comments and give feedback when issues require escalation in Jira Service Management. Everyone has access to the same tickets so you can maintain a seamless experience across customers, employees, agents, and developers. This guide will outline the key concepts you need to know for the optimal integration between Jira Service Management and Jira Software.

Common use cases for integrating Jira Service Management with Jira Software:

Self-service portal

Jira Service Management offers an intuitive self-service portal for bugs, feature requests, incidents, and other development-related requests from the customers (internal or external) that the development team supports. Through the service portal (or email, embeddable widget, chat, or API), agents streamline the intake of work for the development team by triaging tickets.

Out-of-the-box knowledge base

Customers can easily view the out-of-the-box knowledge base included with Jira Service Management for self-serve FAQs and how-to articles, potentially deflecting some incoming requests like bug reports and feature requests for your development team. Support agents can create, read, update, and delete knowledge articles directly within Jira Service Management.

Issue sharing and linking

Atlassian’s unified platform empowers support, IT, operations, and development teams to collaborate at scale. Teams can quickly share or link issues between Jira Service Management and Jira Software for simple and effective collaboration between teams. Additionally, Jira’s native automation engine can be used to create, link, and even comment on issues across Jira Service Management and Jira Software projects.

Robust incident management for critical services

Teams can collaborate together to resolve incidents faster and restore critical services with one-click major incident escalations in Jira Service Management. For urgent issues, teams can use on-call scheduling, alerts, incident conference calls, chat channels, and the incident investigation view to give the right people all the information they need to take action.

Change management for the DevOps era

Jira Service Management’s change management features remove barriers with development teams and speeds up workflows by automating changes. Teams can lighten their workload with automated change risk assessments, and advanced approval workflows. Plus Jira Service Management offers integration features like deployment tracking and deployment gating with CI/CD tools like Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, CircleCI, and Octopus Deploy.

Asset and service configuration management

Jira Service Management’s native asset and configuration management functionality allows teams to track their assets, configuration items, and resources to gain visibility into critical relationships between applications, services, the underlying infrastructure, and other key assets supported by IT, operations and development teams.

(available in Premium and Enterprise editions of Jira Service Management)


Add Jira Service Management to your Atlassian cloud site

To get started, if you haven't already, be sure to add Jira Service Management to your cloud site that contains Jira Software or vice versa. Having both products on the same cloud site ensures you will have an optimal integration between the two products. To add Jira Service Management or Jira Software to your cloud site:

  1. Log into your cloud site as the site admin.
  2. Select the menu picker icon located on the left of your screen (9 squares).
  3. Select Administration and then select Discover Applications.
  4. Select Jira Service Management or Jira Software by selecting “Try it now”.
Using menu picker in your Atlassian Cloud site to add Jira Service Management

Check out our product guides for help getting started with Jira Service Management or Jira Software.


Understanding user types and roles

It’s important to understand the different user types and roles in Jira Service Management so you can easily share information across your Jira products. Jira Service Management has various user types and roles based on a combination of licensing, global permissions, and project permissions.

User types across Jira Software and Jira Service Management: collaborator, project administrator, agent, customer, and request participant

We’ll expand upon collaborators, agents, and request participants in the sections below. View our overview of Jira Cloud products page for more information about what licensed users in one Jira product can do in another.

Collaborator

Collaborators in Jira Service Management

Collaborators are licensed users of other Jira products who work with Jira Service Management agents. They can assist agents with customer requests by providing more context to issues. For example, a developer with a Jira Software license can help an agent in Jira Service Management resolve a bug-related issue by leaving an internal comment on the issue to explain the cause of the bug and any workaround available.

Jira Software licensed users without a Jira Service Management license can do the following in Jira Service Management as a collaborator:

  • View issues, comments, and attachments.
  • Add attachments and delete their own attachments.
  • Add internal comments to issues and delete their own comments.
  • Watch and vote for issues.
  • View other watchers and voters.

Please note that by default, Jira Software users can’t view or internal comment on Jira Service Management issues, nor can they view links to these issues in Jira Software. To enable this functionality, it’s essential that the proper permissions are established in Jira Service Management (see below).

To give Jira Software users permission to view (browse) Jira Service Management issues:
  1. From your service project, go to Project settings > Permissions.
  2. Select Actions > Edit permissions.
  3. Under Project permissions, select Edit for the Browse Projects permission.
  4. Under Granted to, select Application access.
  5. From the dropdown, select Any logged in user.
  6. Select Grant.
Under "Project permissions" and "Browse projects" you can give Jira Software users permission to view
To give Jira Software users permission to internal comment on Jira Service Management issues:
  1. From your service project, go to Project settings > Permissions.
  2. Select Actions > Edit permissions.
  3. Under Comment permissions, select Edit for the Add Comments permission.
  4. Under Granted to, select Application access.
  5. From the dropdown, select Any logged in user.
  6. Select Grant.
Giving a user permission to internal comment on Jira Service Management Issues
Agent

Agents in Jira Service Management

It is also important to note that users that are only licensed in Jira Software cannot act as agents in Jira Service Management. Agents are licensed users added to the Service Desk Team role in your service project who work on customer requests and can add customers to the service project.

Agents can do things such as:

  • view the queues, reports, and SLA metrics within a service project.
  • view, add, edit and delete customer-facing and internal comments on issues.
  • transition issues through stages of a workflow.
  • add customers to a service project.
  • view, create, and manage content in the knowledge base.
  • manage customers and organizations.

By default, Jira Service Management agents can also view, comment on, and transition Jira Software issues.

Collaborators don’t have access to the majority of the service project interface (queues, reports, and SLAs) and can’t work on issues (e.g., log work, externally comment, or transition them) unless they are also licensed in Jira Service Management as an agent.

Request Participant

Request participants in Jira Service Management

Jira Service Management agents can also share requests with other Jira team members as a request participant. Request participants are people who agents or customers have shared a request with. They can view and comment on requests from the customer portal and they receive the same email notifications as the reporter of the request.

Jira Software users who have the request shared with them can interact with customers in the portal and do the following as a request participant:

  • View requests in the portal.
  • Add external comments in the portal.
  • Add attachments in the portal.
  • Transition the request through its workflow in the portal.

Agents can add request participants by sharing the request from its issue view:

Request participant in issue view in Jira Service Management

Optimize your custom fields in Jira Service Management

Next, let’s talk about a best practice when using both Jira Service Management and Jira Software: custom fields. To match issues in Jira Service Management with issues in Jira Software, they need to share a custom field set.

Creating custom fields and screens also helps you collect the right information from users, especially when users are reporting bugs in Jira Service Management and this information is regularly being linked to Jira Software issues.

For example, by default, the Bug issue type in Jira Service Management comes with these fields:

  • Summary
  • Symptom
  • Attachment

However, you might want to add your own custom fields to collect more information to reduce blockers when fixing bugs. Common custom fields used by developers include:

  • Steps to reproduce the bug
  • Observed and expected behavior
  • Screenshots
Creating a custom field in Jira Service Management

Utilize automation to create, link, and edit issues across Jira products

Create a linked issue using automation in Jira Service Management

In addition to manually creating linked issues between Jira Service Management and Jira Software, you can also use Jira Service Management’s native automation engine to automatically create linked issues.

For example, when a request arrives that has the request type ‘Bug', you can automatically create a linked Jira Software issue for your developers. Or consider when a request moves to a certain status in a Jira Service Management workflow, a Jira Software issue can be created for your dev team when this transition occurs. Jira Service Management’s native automation engine offers a lot of flexibility with unique triggers, conditions, branching rules, and actions that allow you to build an automation rule to fit your team’s needs.

Note that automation can also be used to create and link issues across multiple Jira Service Management and Jira Work Management projects as well.

To create a new automation rule:

  1. Navigate to Project settings.
  2. Select Automation in the left-hand menu.
  3. Select Create rule to get started.
Creating a linked issue using automation between Jira Service Management and Jira Software

For linked Jira issues, select the Create issue action which allows you to specify the project, issue type, and fields to set among other options. Then select the Link issues action to link the newly created issue to the trigger issue.

Automatically close and comment on Jira Service Management issues from a linked Jira Software issue

Finally, Jira’s native automation engine can also be used to close multiple linked issues across Jira Software and Jira Service Management.

For example, let’s say your service desk team has received multiple tickets reporting a bug with your mobile app. Those issues have all been linked to a single ticket in Jira Software for your mobile app development team. Once the team has resolved the bug, they close the parent issue in Jira Software.

Automation can be configured in this scenario to auto-close any linked Jira Service Management issues and even provide an automated comment on the issue, saving your service desk team time while simultaneously informing your customers of the resolution.

Transition and comment on Jira Service Management issues using automation

Note: Global and multi-project automation helps teams scale with less administration by allowing them to create one rule that can automate across many or all projects. Global and multi-project automation is available in Premium and Enterprise plans of Jira Service Management and Jira Software.


Tips and tricks

Agent onboarding