Integrating with Atlassian JIRA

Meliora Testlab can be integrated with Atlassian JIRA to allow users to utilize JIRA for tickets and Meliora Testlab for managing the testing. The integration is seamless – the integrated data is always entered once and available in both systems. When up to date situation can always be seen in both systems the teams can work efficiently in development and testing tasks. The integration allows JIRA tickets to be seen in Testlab as requirements and/or as issues.

The integration does not require any plugins to be installed in JIRA nor Testlab. It is included in all the Testlab service levels.

• Uses for the integration

  The underlying business reason to integrate the two systems often is that the development team is used to use  JIRA’s powerful features, and the testing team wants to do the testing in an efficient, repeatable and systematic way using Meliora Testlab. When the two systems are integrated together, the test designers can always rely to have the latest information available about the system under test when designing test cases and when executing the test cases. Also, the finding of testing is communicated seamlessly between all interested parties. Having all relevant information in Testlab allows users to produce reports and views that enable best possible decisionmaking in the project.

  When integrated with JIRA, you have a possibility to use either one or both of the following:

  • Integrate the issues. In this scenario, you create and update your issues always in JIRA interface and the changes are pushed in real-time to the Testlab project. The integration is seamless from Testlab – when you click “Add issue” in Testlab, the correct window is opened in Jira. When you click the Edit issue in Testlab, the correct issue is opened in Jira. This is most often used for integrating the creating of bug tickets.
  • Integrate the requirements or user stories, making it possible to design (a part) of your specification in your JIRA and include this part of the specification to Testlab’s requirement hierarchy. Having the specification in Testlab allows test designers to design the most relevant test cases and have your testers have the ability to see the specification during the testing making their work more effective as well.

   

• Integrating the issues and the requirements

  Both of the offered integrations are used for a bit different purpose and are set up separately. Please read more from the table below. Both of the integrations are available for JIRA hosted by Atlassian and JIRA on your own servers.

  Integration method (linked to further documentation)	Description
  Integration for issues with WebHooks	Pushing issues from your JIRA to Testlab in real-time Issues are always and modified created in JIRA Testlab’s UI makes it easy to jump between systems Master repository for issues is JIRA Issues are replicated to Testlab for real-time reporting Supports integrating multiple JIRA projects to a single Testlab project Can be configured in use directly from JIRA’s and Testlab’s UI You can define which JIRA issues you wish to see in Testlab.
  Integration for requirements with WebHooks	Pushing issues* from your JIRA to Testlab as requirements and/or user stories in real-time Stories are replicated to Testlab for real-time reporting Supports integrating multiple JIRA projects to a single Testlab project Can be configured in use directly from JIRA’s and Testlab’s UI

  * “issue” term here means any type of issue your JIRA is configured with (such as “Story”, “Task”, …)

• Security considerations

  When any Information Technology systems are used, the security has to be taken in to account. The same stands for integrations, and so it is for Testlab – JIRA integration. This integration is built with high-security standards, using standard building blocks of JIRA and the Internet. But as nothing on the Internet is 100% riskfree, here are a few things to consider if integrating these two systems is a risk for you:

  • Your users need to be able to access both JIRA and Testlab ( as without the integration).  Most of the time user interface of an IT system is by far the most probable attack vector. This means that integrating the two systems does not increase the risk much.
  • JIRA and the Testlab communicate when desired data needs to be transferred.
    • JIRA sends data to the Testlab using webhooks
      • Webhooks are the main way to integrate other systems into JIRA. They are built-in and trusted by Atlassian.
    • Testlab fetches additional data from JIRA using REST api.
    • If you have limited direct user access for either of the services – for example, if your users need to use VPN to be able to access the services, to enable the integration you need to open your firewalls only between the servers.
    • The traffic between the servers is encrypted using the same standard way as the traffic from your end-users to the servers. The protocol used is HTTPS. The security level for the transport of íntegration data is as good as it is for your JIRA and the Testlab without the integration.
  • User accounts in both systems are used the same way as without the integration.
  • No shared user accounts are used.

  If you have a need to have the security of the integration hardened, or need to know details how the integration works, please contact Meliora support and we’ll help you!