Understanding group-level integration with Jira
What’s this issue all about?
This request is in support of workflowproblem validation for the Group level integration with Jira issue.
Currently, integrating Jira with GitLab happens at the Project level. This causes friction for users in two prominent places:
- When making changes to existing integrations (i.e. changing the password/token, or adding new workflow steps in Jira)
- Having to enable this every time a new project is created
Specifically, I have talked to a handful of customers who manage 100s of projects, and making a simple change like rotating the Jira admin's password requires hours and hours of busywork (toil) that is error-prone and painful.
Who is the target user of the feature?
Changes to this feature will affect both any user who is an owner of a project, and any administrator responsible for managing a Jira instance that integrates with GitLab.
What questions are you trying to answer?
Core questions
- Is this really a problem, or does it only impact a small number of users?
- Does this problem have a large enough impact on those users to affect our ability to sell to or retain customers?
- Will group-level integration solve it?
Additional questions
- What's the benefit of keeping this integration only at the project level? (Is there one?)
- How do multiple integrations with the same Jira instance tend to differ? Do customers tend to have unique integrations, or are they all the same?
- In what ways can solving this problem help GitLab expand existing customer installations?
- Is there an associated churn risk if we don't fix this?
- Where does this problem tend to surface most? What workflows (JTBD) see the most impact from this?
- How much can improvements here raise the overall customer satisfaction?
- Are there other services that would also see major benefits by group-level integration? (Or rather, see major drawbacks from project-level ones?)
What hypotheses and/or assumptions do you have?
The central hypothesis of this problem validation is: Integrating Jira at the Project level is inadequate for large installations.
More broadly, my assumptions are that:
- This is a problem.
- This affects many users, primarily ones with large installations.
- This is painful when managing large numbers of projects.
- This will only become a bigger problem over time (as we seek larger customers).
- Group-level integration will sufficiently solve this problem for most users.
What decisions will you make based on the research findings?
Based on these findings, I will decide whether to proceed on the Group level integration with Jira issue, or if another solution makes more sense. Other approaches may be feature improvements to Service Templates or cloning configuration to multiple projects of which you are an owner, for example.
What's the latest milestone that the research will still be useful to you?
Related Resources
- Issue - Group level integration with Jira
- Opportunity Canvas (internal, Mural)
- Opportunity Canvas Review (Video) (internal)
- Salesforce Research Spreadsheet (internal)
- Jira - Group-level integration Interview Guide (internal)
Completed Interviews
- 2019-10-21 (internal)
- 2019-09-30 (internal)