How to import your backlog from Jira

Aha! Roadmaps

Your Jira backlog defines the work an engineering team has committed to. Pull it into an Aha! Roadmaps workspace to link those records to your strategic plans, and to take advantage of your Jira integration's real-time bidirectional updates and custom field mappings.

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Click any of the following links to skip ahead:

Confirm user permissions

Since we will be importing a Jira backlog to an Aha! Roadmaps workspace, you will need at least Aha! Roadmaps owner permissions.

Action

User permissions

Create or edit a Jira integration

Owner permissions

Use the Jira backlog importer

Owner permissions

Pull in your intended Jira records

Appropriate Jira user permissions for the Jira Username you used to configure the integration.

This last Action can catch users unaware, so it is worth highlighting. Each Jira integration's webhook runs as a particular Aha! user. That user needs to have permissions in your Atlassian account. You can only import 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.

Flowchart showing the fields that affect the Jira integration data flow.

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Select an integration

Let's get started. If you want to follow along:

  • From the hierarchy dropdown, select the Aha! Roadmaps workspace where you want to import the Jira backlog.

  • Navigate to Settings ⚙️ -> Workspace -> Import from Jira, Azure, Rally, and more.

  • Choose a Jira integration. In this case, we have an existing integration so you will select Existing integration, choose Jira, then click Next.

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Choose record types

Next, we choose what record types we want to import from Jira to the Aha! workspace. There are several different ways to map Aha! and Jira record types together. In this case, we have chosen this structure:

Jira record type

Aha! record type

Epic

Epic

User story

Feature

Sub-task

Requirement

Version

Release

Workspace-level development tool importer on the Choose record type step.

  • Check the box beside the record type(s) you want to import. In this case, we have a brand new Aha! Roadmaps workspace — so we will import all four record types.

  • We could filter each record type with custom JQL strings. But since this is a new workspace, we will keep the import simple and import every record that has not yet been completed.

Workspace-level development tool importer on the Choose record types step showing the default JQL filters.

  • Click Save and continue to move on.

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Review and import

Finally, there is a preview of the first 10 records in each record type we chose to import. Everything here looks great — let's import the backlog!

Workspace-level development tool importer on the Review step.

  • Click Import records to complete the backlog import.

After the importer completes, we will see a breakdown of the records imported, plus any errors — records that already exist in our Aha! account, or records that we did not have permission to access in Jira. The backlog importer will pull in any of the records you select that the integration's Run as user has access to — so remember, you might have access to a record in Jira that your integration does not.

When the import completes, we can run it again, or import records from another integration — useful if we wanted to import a separate Jira project backlog. For now, though, we are done!

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Check your new Aha! records

Now that the import is complete, it is time to review the backlog in your Aha! workspace.

Features board with feature open and linked to Jira.

  • Navigate to Features -> Board. We can see the newly imported backlog in its various releases.

  • Open a feature. Under Integrations, we can see a link to the original Jira record. The Aha! and Jira records are now linked bidirectionally, using the integration configuration and field mappings of the integration we used for the original import.

Everything looks accurate — we are done! From here, we can add links to product strategy, prioritize the work with the product value score, or start discussions with engineering teams in comments.

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