Atlassian JIRA is a popular tool for keeping track of jobs and issues and is widely-used by project managers and software developers. In fact, we use JIRA in our own team to to keep track of new features and requests for Quick Timesheets.
While JIRA provides basic tools for tracking estimated and actual time on tasks, it has limited functionality as a dedicated time-tracking tool. For example, you may have other areas of your business (ie: non-development) who don’t use JIRA, making it difficult to consolidate your timesheets within one application.
Quick Timesheets allows your users to track time-sheet entries against your JIRA Issues so you can unify your time-tracking across your entire business.
How does it work?
This feature works by (periodically) synchronising your JIRA Issues with Quick Timesheets. The set-up does not require any effort installing server-side software or plug-ins, and should only take a few minutes of your day to get under way.
Step 1. JIRA Configuration
Hooking your system up with JIRA is a simple matter of navigating to your JIRA instance and accessing the Administration panel’s ‘General Configuration’ section.
Next, locate the ‘Accept API Remote Calls’ option, and toggle it to ON. This will allow Quick Timesheets users to associate logged times with specific JIRA issues via the API, without requiring the installation of a plugin.
Step 2. Quick Timesheets Configuration
Next, return to Quick Timesheets and navigate to ‘Settings’ -> ‘JIRA’.
Check the ‘Enable Module’ check box. This will tell Quick Timesheets to enable the JIRA integration functionality.
Choose your preferred option from the ‘Input Behavior’ dropdown menu. This allows you to choose whether the inclusion of a JIRA issue ID is optional (Optional entry), mandatory (Always required), or mandatory only if a JIRA project has been associated with the client or the task (more details are below).
Provide a JIRA username and password for an account with permission to the issues you wish Quick Timesheets to be able to index.
Tip - Rather than using an account already held by a user, create a new account in JIRA with the necessary permissions. For those with limited licences, removing the newly created account from the JIRA User group will ensure that it doesn’t count toward your license limit.
Enter your WSDL URL. The WSDL URL should be in the form of https://<your-jira-domain-name.com>/rpc/soap/jirasoapservice-v2?wsdl and click Save.
A status message will be displayed, which should say ‘Connecting to JIRA’. When the sync finishes it should look something like this (refresh the page to check the status).
38 projects containing a total of 3374 JIRA Issues were successfully fetched on 2012-01-25 15:16:01 EST +1100.
Once connected successfully, Quick Timesheets will connect every hour to your JIRA server and synchronise the issues. If you need to immediately perform a sync, then click on ‘Fetch new issues’ which will perform the sync straight away.
Advanced - You can optionally specify a JIRA project for a Client or Task so that the JIRA project field is pre-populated when a user enters a time entry. You enable this functionality by entering a JIRA Project fields for your Client or Task Settings (‘Settings’ -> ‘Clients and Tasks’).
Step 3. Entering a Timesheet with a JIRA ID
Now you should be able to associate logged time back to JIRA issues by filling out the auto-indexing JIRA ID field.
When you click ‘Done’ to save your time entry, you will have successfully completed a JIRA-linked time entry.
Step 4. Searching for Time Entries by JIRA ID
It is easy to search for time entries linked to specific JIRA projects or issues by making use of the JIRA ID field on the Quick Timesheets Search panel.
Questions or Feedback?
We’d love to hear from you if you are using this feature, so please drop us an email at support@quicktimesheets.com.