Some feedback calls for quick action. When your customers report a bug or suggest a quick improvement, you want to respond swiftly to build trust and keep your product moving forward. The Jira for Ideas integration enables you map, send, and sync ideas directly to Jira — so you can move bugs and other quick wins directly to development, then see the work's status in your Aha! account as it progresses in Jira.
Ready to get started? This article will walk you through setting up the integration and sending ideas to Jira.
This article discusses functionality that is included in the Aha! Ideas Advanced plan. Please contact us if you would like a live demo or want to try using it in your account.
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Overview
The Jira for Ideas integration is a workspace-level integration in which you can map ideas in your workspace to Jira issues and send ideas in your Aha! account directly to Jira. When you send an idea to Jira, the fields you have mapped will sync between the two records. This enables you to see an idea's status update as work progresses in Jira. Then, when the issue ships, the idea's status will ship as well — notifying idea subscribers automatically that their feedback has been addressed.
You cannot import records into your Aha! account from Jira through this integration. If you need to import Jira records into your Aha! account as ideas, you can do so via CSV import.
Configure the integration
To configure your first Jira for Ideas integration, you will need your Jira account URL, Email address, and API token. (If you do not have an API token already, you can create one). Any workspace owner in your Aha! account can enable this integration.
Navigate to Settings ⚙️ -> Workspace, and then click the + icon next to Integrations in the left navigation bar. Choose Jira for Ideas to open the integration builder.
Start
Create your integration:
Enter a Name for your integration.
(Optional) If you have an existing integration template you want to use, select it in the Template field.
Click Save and continue.
Configure account
On the Configure account tab, enter the following information:
Server URL: Enter the URL used to access Jira without a trailing slash, e.g. https://fredwin.atlassian.net.
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Username and Password: Configure a Jira user.
If you are using Jira Cloud, you will add a Jira user's email address and that user will need to create an API token in Jira to use as your password. If they do not use an API token, the integration will break with a 403 error.
If you are using an on-premises installation of Jira, we recommend entering a username and generating a personal access token to authenticate. You can also use a username and password.
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Password type: Choose the type of password you are adding. Choices are API token, Password, and Personal Access Token (PAT):
If you are using Jira Cloud, you must choose API token.
For Jira on-premises, you can choose Password or Personal Access Token (PAT).
Validate certificate: Check this to validate your server's HTTPS/TLS certificate. Leave this box unchecked if you do not have a hostname to verify the HTTPS/TLS certificate against.
Click Save and continue.
Select Jira project
In the Select Jira project tab, you will choose the project where issues will be created and synced with ideas in your Aha! account:
Select a Jira Project to link with your Aha! workspace. The Project you select will populate the field mappings in the next step.
(Optional) Select a Board within your Project.
Click Save and continue once done.
Once you select a project, do not rename your project key in Jira. If you do, some of the integration's functionality will break. For example, the ability to Reload configuration on the Mappings step will no longer work if you rename your project key in Jira.
Configure mappings
In the Mappings tab, configure which Jira record type(s) you want to map to ideas in your Aha! account.
In the mappings table, map idea records in your Aha! account to each Jira issue type you want to use. Do not forget to map statuses between the record types!
(Optional) For each record mapping, configure field mappings that you want to sync between records.
If you have configured required fields in Jira, we recommend setting the Required flag on those fields in the custom idea layout associated with your workspace.
Enable the integration
Configure how you want data to flow between your Aha! account and Jira. To do this, you will need a Jira webhook.
This is a critical step in the integration configuration as it allows the integration to function in a two-way capacity.
In the Enable tab, copy the webhook URL from the Webhook URL field and save it aside. You will enter it in Jira in a later step.
Webhook URL: Click the box to Enable webhook.
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Paste in a Jira webhook. If you do not have a webhook handy, read below or follow the instructions in the modal to create one in Jira.
Each Jira integration's webhook runs as a particular Aha! user. That user needs to have permissions in your Atlassian account. You can only sync parts of your Jira backlog that your integration has access to, as defined by the Username you used in the Configure Account step of the integration builder.
While every integration you configure contains a unique webhook, only one webhook is needed for most configurations. This is because the Jira webhook exists at a system level and, as such, a single webhook can communicate account-wide changes back to your Aha! account. To learn more about webhooks, see How Aha! Roadmaps webhooks work for Jira Integrations.
In Jira
Open Jira and navigate to the administration section on the System tab. Then choose Webhooks. You will need to be Jira administrator user to do this.
Create a new webhook in Jira, and then paste in the webhook URL that you copied from the Enable step of the integration in your Aha! account.
Select all of the following checkboxes: Issue, Version, Worklog, and Comment events.
Save the webhook.
Finally, decide how you want to send data through this integration.
To specify how updates from your Aha! account are sent to your development system, select an option in the Sending section:
Approve outgoing changes: Allows teams that are new to the integration to validate what is being sent to their development system and prevent unintentional changes from going through. We recommend this option until the team is familiar with how the integration works, at which point, you can switch to automatic sending.
Automatically send outgoing changes: Automatically sends changes to Jira and does not require manual approval.
Add additional security
2.0 integrations have the option to include a client certificate for added integration security. This is also called mutual TLS (mTLS).
To set a client certificate, open your integration settings and click the More options icon in the upper right, then click Set client certificate. From here, enter the private key and certificate — we recommend creating a private key and client certificate specifically for this purpose — and click Save to save your changes.
If you use an integration template to manage multiple integrations in the same workspace, set the client certificate in your integration template. That way, you only need to set the client certificate once.
This feature will only provide additional security when the server that your Aha! account is communicating with validates the certificate. This is usually only possible with customer-configured on-premises integrations. Client certificate authentication is in addition to the standard username and password/token authentication and is not a replacement.
Send ideas to Jira
You can send an idea to Jira directly from the idea's integration field.
Locate the integration field.
Select Send to Jira for Ideas (issue type).
The integration will create a new issue in Jira that will sync to your idea. All fields you have mapped in your configured field mappings should stay in sync and display on the idea as the corresponding Jira issue moves through development.
Data deletion
Now that records are flowing between your Aha! account and Jira, understand what happens when you delete a record in either tool.
If you delete an idea in your Aha! account, it will not delete its corresponding issue in Jira. Likewise, if you delete a Jira issue, it will not delete the corresponding idea in your Aha! account. This is intentional, so that one team cannot delete another team's work.
Manage your integration
If you run into difficulties with your Jira integration, start with the integration logs. Next, review answers to common problems in the Jira troubleshooting guide.