DEVOPSdigest

Tasktop announced that its latest release of the Tasktop Value Stream Management platform supports Jira Align.

With this new Jira Align connector, organizations are able to automate and measure the flow of work between Jira Align and other work management, design, testing, release, ITSM and CRM tools, connecting business ideas to their technology implementation.

The Jira Align connector expands Tasktop’s comprehensive connector infrastructure and technology, known as the Flow Fabric™, which supports full fidelity and real-time connectivity to more than 60 Agile, DevOps and IT tools.

Jira Align is an enterprise agile planning tool, increasingly popular in large enterprises for strategic planning. Ideas that start in Jira Align are executed in work management tools like Jira, Azure DevOps and Rally; tested in tools like Tosca, qTest, ALM and SmartBear; and supported in ITSM tools like Jira Service Desk, ServiceNow and Remedy. Connecting the toolchain through a pure-play VSM platform rapidly improves flow and visibility from the originating idea through its development, release and subsequent feedback loops.

Tasktop’s Jira Align connector offers enterprises several unique advantages and extends Tasktop Hub’s reliability, sophistication and scalability to the world of Jira Align, tightly integrating it with the rest of the value stream and more than 60 tools.

Tasktop Hub offers practitioners that work in Jira Align or rely on data from Jira Align the following benefits:

- Reliable and seamless bi-directional synchronization of Themes, Epics, Capabilities, Features, Stories and more, eliminating friction and delays

- Routing of feature work to the right team in the right tool based on its program or any other feature fields, and using filters to determine what’s eligible to flow

- Elegant merging of several acceptance criteria from Jira Align into a single, rich text format field in a targeted tool, like Jira or Tosca

- Embedding back-references (links) to twinned Jira Align artifacts to automate traceability and facilitate communication across silos

- Easy error resolution with robust monitoring, troubleshooting and retry mechanisms

According to Atlassian's Steve Elliot, head of product for Jira Align, “The depth and breadth of Tasktop’s integration capabilities can help improve the speed, velocity and quality of software delivery. By integrating data from the end-to-end value stream alongside enterprise agile planning to include work done in testing, design and support tools, Jira Align users have better oversight and visibility into the execution of the vision laid out in Jira Align.”

Jira Align is also supported by Tasktop Viz™, to provide enterprises with insight into the flow of business value, starting from strategic planning in Jira Align and all through the implementation by individual value streams working in other tools.

Tasktop Viz finds bottlenecks in end-to-end flow, answering questions like: How fast can business ideas become reality? Where is work slowing down? What is the business case for investments that can shorten time-to-market and increase velocity?

“This new integration provides more visibility into flow and optimization opportunities at the early stages of idea elaboration and planning,” said Nicole Bryan, CPO at Tasktop. “Flow metrics and diagnostics on the work done in Jira Align and its subsequent breakdown in other tools can help shine a light on activity at the top of the funnel and help organizations progress their shift from project to product.”