Jacques Schoofs
Introduction
There's no need to convince anyone that JIRA is a great centralized issue management system, going from incident management with JIRA Service Desk to software development with JIRA Software using industry standards like Scrum and Kanban. JIRA enables you to work together with different teams on different projects and be notified about any change in an issue you're actively working on or watching as an interested party. You can even send an email to a pre-configured email address and JIRA will turn it into an issue.
Fig 1. Example on how JIRA handles incoming email
Tell the whole story
When you have JIRA create your issue through an incoming email, it will forget the formatting and encrusted images that were part of your email. It will insert cryptic references to where the images are supposed to go and doesn't care about formatted text or tables. This leaves you figuring out where each image goes or what parts of the email ware formatted to draw your attention. In Atlassian's Marketplace there are add-ons like ReceiveMe! that help remediate this shortcoming. These add-ons will handle your incoming mail and preserve formatting just as it was in the original email. This way you and your co-workers are no longer have to figure out where each image goes or what data was in a table and you can focus your attention on the issue.
Fig. 2: Example of how ReceiveMe! will turn your email into a fully formatted issue
Get others involved
Being agile means that your user stories are short and to the point. They should not be overloaded with details, but contain just enough information for your team to be able to develop its goal. Sometimes, however, you are so overwhelmed with different story-lines in your project that you need feedback from people outside your team. Getting a fresh opinion on important stories can help you clear your project road map. Sharing your JIRA user story with others, outside your team or company, allows for extensive collaboration. Add-ons like NotifyMe! provide you with the necessary tools to send any issue data to a custom recipient list. Your recipients don't necessarily need a JIRA licence to receive your mail. If you set up your incoming mail handlers correctly these external users can even reply to the mail you sent. JIRA will convert their mail into comments to the issue you sent out and generate an unlicensed user account for them in case they didn't have one.
Add your company's look & feel
JIRA's standard notifications do not allow for simple layout changes. Even if it only were for adding your company logo in the mail footer. Changes like this require you to fallback on finding an add-on that will permit you to implement different notification templates. TemplateMe! is one of these add-ons. It will let you create customized templates and group them in a notification scheme you can then link to any JIRA project.
Fig 3. Create your own notification template
Once your customized notification scheme is in place. Your notifications will breath the same look & feel as your company's communications.
Fig 4. Customized email notifications
Tying it all together
As the title of this post mentions: good communication leads to great products. On your way to success it's important to have your trip to be as smooth and comfortable as possible. JIRA Software goes a very long way to achieving this. Having your emails imported into JIRA the way you expected them to help to get rid of cryptic attachments code in your issue descriptions. Customizing your email notifications to follow your company guidelines increase your employees feel part of a great team. Getting feedback from others that are not part of your daily team gives you a broader input on your product roadmap. These 3 additional features can easily added to your JIRA instance by looking for ReceiveMe!, NotifyMe! and TemplateMe! from Atlassian's Marketplace. Enjoy your journey!