The traditional workflow of a service desk will involve a customer raising a request, and an agent working with the customer to come up with a solution. This will usually work in scenarios where the problem is simple and straightforward to solve. However, in many real-world situations, the problem can be complicated, and may require multiple people from different teams to collaborate together to be resolved.
In this recipe, we will look at how to collaborate with people outside of the standard support team. Normally, you will run a single JIRA instance hosting both your service desk and engineering projects, so it is very easy to collaborate together in the single system. In this recipe, we will look at a more complex scenario where the support team is using a JIRA Service Desk instance, and the engineering team is using a separate JIRA Software instance, and having both teams work together on resolving a customer request.
The first step is to create an Application Link between your JIRA Service Desk instance and the JIRA Software instance. You can refer to the recipe Integrating JIRA with other JIRA instances in Chapter 7, Integrations with JIRA, for detailed information. If you have already integrated both JIRA instances, you can skip these steps.
- Navigate to Administration | Applications | Application links.
- Enter the JIRA Software instance's URL, and create the application link. JIRA should automatically detect the target application as JIRA. If, for some reason, it does not do so, make sure you select JIRA as the Application Type when prompted.
Once you have linked both the JIRA instances, the agent and/or collaborator will be able to link the request in your service desk to the issue in engineering project.
- Browse to the request in service desk.
- Select the Link option under the More menu.
- Select the JIRA Software instance from the Server drop-down list.
- Choose the relationship between the request and issue. Usually, you should use the is caused by option.
- Select the issue to link to the request. You can type in the issue key directly if you have it, or click on the search for an issue link to run a search.
- Make sure the Create reciprocal link option is checked, so a link will also be created for the issue. This will let the engineers know that there is a customer request pending on the resolution of the issue, and help the engineering team to prioritize their tasks.
- Select the Internal comment tab if you want to add a comment to provide additional details to the agent working on the request. The comment you add this way will not be visible to the customer.
- Click on the Link button to create the link.
The window looks like the following screenshot:
The JIRA platform has an out-of-box feature called Application Link, which allows you to integrate multiple instances of Atlassian products together—in this case, JIRA Service Desk and JIRA Software. By creating an application link between the two, our JIRA Service Desk is able to recognize our JIRA Software instance, and access the data it has, specifically, issues.
Once we have created an issue link between the customer request and engineering issue, both systems will be able to query and display each other's status, so when an agent looks at the request, he or she is able to also see the status of the linked engineering issue, even if it is from a different system. Once the engineer completes the issue, the agent will see the status update automatically from within the request.
