JIRA Upgrade: Linking Epics to Work In Accelo

Are you a fan of agile project management? Do you love keeping your client work organized? Are you already using (or about to use) Accelo’s integration with JIRA? Yes, yes and more yes? Keep reading...

Accelo now integrates with JIRA Epics, which means you can link an Epic to a project, ticket or retainer in Accelo, and then any Issue created against that Epic will automatically appear. 

What's an Epic?

Epics in JIRA represent a large body of work that is grouped together and broken down into a number of smaller stories - sometimes called “Issues” in JIRA. They often encompass multiple teams, on multiple projects, and can even be tracked on multiple boards.

A refresher on the Accelo <> JIRA integration

In case you're not familiar with it, Accelo integrates with JIRA by using a custom field on a JIRA Issue. When the field is populated - most commonly through our Chrome Extension, but you can also copy and paste the URL for the Accelo work into the field - Accelo will know that you want to connect that JIRA issue to Accelo and will then create and keep synchronized an Accelo Task. Any work logs, comments, or changes on the Issue in JIRA will come into Accelo, making it easy for project managers and non-developers to see the work being done by JIRA users without having to leave JIRA.

So, how does the Epic integration with Accelo change things?

The biggest shortcoming with our existing integration was the need for developers to remember to set the custom field value when they were creating/updating a specific JIRA issue. For developers creating lots of small Issues in a hurry, this additional - and optional - step was unwelcome (and often not done).

With this new improvement, you'll now be able to link an Epic to work in Accelo - be it a project, a milestone, a ticket, or a retainer - and then, whenever a team member creates a JIRA issue against that Epic, Accelo will automatically create a matching Task under the work that Epic is linked to. This means, you just need to link from JIRA to Accelo once, and all future Issues will be linked - no matter who or how they're created - and mapped back into Accelo automatically.

By automating the linking process for individual issues, developers save a lot of time, and because it doesn't require them remembering to link the JIRA issue to the Accelo work, you'll also have a more accurate and complete picture of what's going on in your Accelo projects.

New JIRA Design Support

JIRA's cloud users will be aware that they are rolling out a new, optional interface. Accelo's Chrome Extension has been updated to support JIRA’s new design enhancements, so if you are using the new version, you'll be able to use our extension once again. The good news for people who don't like the new interface, or who are using installed versions of JIRA, is that we're making sure the extension still works with the existing/older layout.

If you have any questions or concerns about these improvements please contact [email protected] and we'll do everything we can to help :)