Jira bot for Slack — Take 2

Elizabeth Batman

Hello world! Again. We are the makers of the JIRA bot for Slack that creates a connection between your Slack instance and your tickets in JIRA. We re-launched yesterday with an all new version.

Our journey to this release started with our transition to Slack from Skype after a brief and unsuccessful migration to HipChat. We found ourselves creating lots of chats in Skype and setting the topic as well as having pop-up groups created constantly. Our developers hated it and rebelled by not responding in these Skype chats.

We knew we needed a different solution and Slack had been making a lot of noise at the time. Our team, like many others liked the features of Slack which need no repeating here.

Upon starting our team we immediately looked in the Slack app store for a connection to JIRA. We rely on JIRA to organize our work and run our agile process.

JIRA to Slack Solution

We quickly found the official Atlassian JIRA plugin for Slack and after reading / installing found it was a solution to send messages from JIRA to Slack — which was not the problem we were trying to solve.

Our need

Our team talks a lot and often we talk about tickets. The following was a very common scenario:

John are you done with MKT-101?
— I am working on MKT-99 but I can take it after I am done.

Call us nerds but this happens 100s of times of week. We wanted a bot to tell us what MKT-101 was and also let us know about MKT-99 (JIRA issue IDs)

We looked in the app store and were surprised that no solution existed. Looking at GitHub we found a few repositories looking to solve the same problem. The original appears to be https://github.com/gsingers/slack-jira-plugin. The problem was that these solutions required self-hosting.

We thought maybe teams would be interested in a turn-key version for easy use and installation.

Welcome Nextup.guru

The basic bot logic was pretty simple to create and we used botkit to build out our version and released in a beta in April of 2016. Along with a full re-write we added a WYSIWYG setup process, account section and Mongo based storage for accounts, users, JIRA info, slack info etc.

Launch day was better than expected and over the past 8 months we found a real demand for the solution with 1,500+ teams encompassing ~100k users.

In the meantime we listened to our users and huddled to create an all new version.

Hello World from Nextup.ai

This week we launched a entirely new version of the bot and decided a new name, website, branding, etc was in order. The new version takes the original idea to a completely different level. The plan is to post soon on our micro-services architecture and details of the tech but this time we will focus on features.

What’s New:

  • Revamped ticket response format
Revamped format with link, ticket stats, description, priority, time remaining and last update
  • Summaries from JIRA for Projects, User and much more
Jira for projects
  • Take action in JIRA from Slack — add, comment, log work, assign, etc
Logging work to a JIRA ticket from Slack
  • User based authentication supporting JIRA permissions and issue security
  • Many to Many connections for both JIRA and Slack
  • much more

The updated bot is available in the Slack app store and at our website — www.nextup.ai

Please take a look and let us know what you think. We hope you like it.

Happy botting.

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