Say ? to Jira emails and clear your inbox

Mike Duff

update pipeline process - Jira

Everything you need, consolidated in Slack

Let’s face it, Jira sends a LOT of emails

Anyone who uses Jira knows about the vast quantity of emails generated by the platform. If anyone reading this actually reads all the Jira email messages then kudos to you!

If you are like most people then you are familiar with an inbox that looks like this….

Slack - email consolidation Jira

This is not new information — The most requested fix on Atlassian’s public issues log JRASERVER-1369 Reduce JIRA email was created in 2003 and has over 450 comments and 1,500 votes.

This January (16 years later) Atlassian released email consolidation for Jira Server in version 8.0 and similar updates are coming soon to Jira Cloud — here is the Atlassian blog on the subject. These changes help reduce email, assuming you still use email and still want to switch context frequently.

This the story of how we are bringing smarter notification consolidation for all Jira teams (Cloud, Server and Data Center) in the coming weeks and how we are going do it all in Slack.

At Nextup.ai we have been working on integration between Slack and Jira since 2017 and during that time thousands of teams have used Jira Integration Plus to streamline their workflows and improve their processes.

Our product offers a paid alternative to simplistic integrations for teams who want to do more. And at $0.75 user/month does so at an extremely low investment.

We moved from HipChat, The free options for Slack were dismal, they provided little to-no-functionality as well as made it so that all channel notifications were managed individually by a JIRA administrator. This plugin has by far more functionality than any other option. Austin at Puppet.com

Last year we released the ability to notify channels when specific things happen in Jira. We allow teams to filter down to the things they care about via our GUI or JQL and we offer a few different output formats and some intelligent chatter reduction features.

Jira notifications

After we added channel based notifications we got a request on our public product roadmap to create a feature to send private notifications in Slack when users are @mentioned in comments in Jira.

The feedback after the release was clear:

  • Users love the ability to respond quickly right from Slack
  • People feel more informed because they actually see/read the Slack message
  • One less Jira email is a step in the right direction
  • More notifications instead of emails would be helpful
Jira Plus notification

The next step taken was to identify @mentions in descriptions and customer feedback was clear — They loved the ability to get notifications in Slack and wanted us to go further.

We needed a way to log issues quickly via Slack (which this integration definitely offers) but the thing our team loves best is being able to see and respond to comments in Jira tickets right away. Everyone loves it! Lauren E-180 | Labs

Taking things a few steps further

Our upcoming release takes direct aim at the problem and looks to move every Jira email into Slack. Just moving them is not enough, we are taking some cues from Atlassian and “batching” updates as well.

To support our vision of better notifications we knew these things would be critical:

  1. Notifications should be consolidated — many Slack messages is similar to too many emails.
  2. Messages should provide quick actions in Slack — our customers love that they can respond, assign, transition, etc without having to switch context into Jira.
  3. Users should be able to manage their own preferences — one size fits all doesn’t make sense and administrators don’t want to manage user preferences.
  4. Our existing channel functionality should support batching — we know from customer feedback, the love of our “compact” view and our own experience that many messages around updates clutters the channel.

After months of work, the new version is moving towards launch prior to Atlassian Summit in April.

Keep reading to see what it is going to do…

User preferences

The first step in the process is connecting a Slack user to a Jira user to ensure the correct person gets a notification when things change. It’s simple to complete and 60,000 users have already completed the setup in our current version.

Once the relationship is created the user is now taken to a screen where they set their notification preferences.

Slack user preferences

User notification preferences

The notifications are broken down into easy to understand categories and mirror the notification schemas in Jira. The difference here is each user decides when they want to be notified, not an administrator.

Assigned issues are things that are assigned to me and I can choose to be notified when the following happens:

  • The issue is assigned to me
  • The issues status changes
  • A comment is added to an issue assigned to me
  • The issues description is changed
  • The priority is updated

Created issues are the ones that I create, either directly from Slack with the Jira Integration Plus bot or in Jira and watched issues are ones that I have indicated I care about.

The options here are the following:

  • Issue marked as completed (resolved)
  • The issues status changes
  • A comment is added to the ticket I created
  • The issues description is changed
  • The priority is updated

Mention settings alert me when users add my name to the issue description or a comment (our currently supported notifications).

I also have the option to not get notified for specific projects. I may for example not care about tickets I create in my team project but want to keep an eye on all my devops tickets.

Determining the frequency of update

As noted before, just moving a million emails to Slack messages isn’t fixing the issue — we knew we wanted to reduce chatter and consolidate messages.

We settled on 4 batching options:

  • Group actions within 5 minutes
  • Group actions within 10 minutes
  • Send a daily digest of changes
  • Send messages immediately (no batching)

The end result

Now that the user has set up their notification preferences and chosen the frequency of update the notifications will start to appear. We now use Slack block kit to improve message formatting as well.

notification preferences - Slack

Updates are consolidated into a single message with clear indications of what has changed and simple actions to keep you moving.

These changes will also be applied to public and private channel configurations to allow batching and consolidated updates for channels in addition to personal notifications.

What’s next

In beta testing our customers have LOVED the new notifications functionality and we are working to tweak and test the new release for our cloud customers and shortly after for our self hosted on-premise teams.

Current teams can look for a notification in the coming weeks when we roll out the new version. In the meantime, your feedback, comments, and questions are welcomed below.

Feel free to check out everything else Jira Integration+ does via our free 30-day trial.

Thanks for reading! Get ready for a clean inbox!

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