Four new features to supercharge your Jira workflows in Slack

Do you use Slack at work to communicate with your team? Do some of your teammates also use Jira? Do you find yourself going back and forth between Slack, Jira and your mailbox to create Jira issues or make small updates? If so, you've probably realised how time-consuming this can be.

This was a common theme identified in our latest Digital Etiquette: Reinventing Work Report, which showed that 50% of us feel like we lose time in our day due to incessant switching between tasks. Additionally, 19% of respondents told us that they felt their productivity and efficiency would improve if there were better integration between their existing tools.

Our Workflow Steps for Jira app allows you to embed Jira-related workflows into Slack, letting you and your teams to save time and work more efficiently. The app enables you to create and update Jira issues with simple actions, such as an emoji reaction to a Slack message.

Since launching our Workflow Steps for Jira app, our team of developers have been hard at work making sure we constantly look at ways to enrich the app with new features to make its users' lives easier and groovier.

Below, we look at four new features of Workflow Steps for Jira to start supercharging your workflows.

Initially, the app only allowed Slack users to update text-based fields, typically captured via the Slack 'Send a Form' step. The value for all other fields was predetermined by the workflow author when the workflow was designed.

Now, the app allows all Jira fields to be set by workflow users if the field prompt option is used when you configure the 'Create Jira Issue step'. All Jira fields are supported, even custom fields. Workflow authors can choose which fields to set, dictate which fields the triggering user is required to set, and provide field default values.

By default, the user who designs the workflow in Slack is set as a watcher because they are the 'Creator', regardless of who the Reporter is. In some instances, this is the expected behaviour but in others, the workflow creator doesn't want their mailbox flooded with notifications of other users' actions.

You can now opt-in via a checkbox to become a watcher on new issues created from your workflows. This way, you won't get any unwanted notifications about Slack workflow executions and Jira issue edits.

Jira issue labels are very important for some teams to filter issues, organise their dashboards, report on data, and visualise what's happening across their project.

You will also want labels to remain consistent across your Jira instance and avoid misspellings and duplications. If users are not given existing labels and have to type them from memory or as they come, irregularities will occur, defeating the purpose of these filters. As such, automated suggestions of existing labels are crucial.

Good news, labels are now supported by our app!

The author of a workflow can specify which label should be automatically assigned to new issues created through the workflow, or they can leave it up to the workflow users to choose their own labels each time the workflow is triggered.

Jira's power comes from its ability to be customised and tailored to any number of use cases, workflows, and access rights. There's no limit to what you can do with Jira!

From the onset, we designed our Workflow Steps for Jira app for Slack to be compatible with custom fields.

However, the wealth and breadth of available fields and values can be overwhelming to end-users, particularly when selecting which Jira issues to update, which fields, and which content. We've updated our prompt step to help everyone handle this more easily.

These are the latest and greatest features our engineers have been working on.

Find out more by taking a look at our workflow templates.

To tell us more about your use case and the features you'd like to see implemented in the future, reach out to us! You can do this by contacting us directly; we'd be happy to help.

By signing up for our Slack newsletter, you can stay informed of new app features and get the latest news and updates delivered straight to your inbox.

Thanks to our Workflow Steps for Jira app, your Jira and Slack workflows will cease to become a stumbling block for teamwork efficiency.

They'll be simply, Slack.