Overview of the JIRA for Forecast integration

Forecast's integration with JIRA strives to give you a world-class project & resource management application. The goal is to significantly improve your ability to create a highly utilized organization, while at the same time ensuring that all those ad-hoc issues can be dealt with without unforeseen consequences. 

This article includes:

• Understanding the JIRA Cloud for Forecast Integration
• How the integration works
• Data flow between Jira and Forecast
• Jira and Forecast's task hierarchy

Understanding the JIRA Cloud for Forecast integration

• The integration with JIRA Cloud synchronizes projects between JIRA and Forecast; it allows for a combined workflow between both JIRA and Forecast users.
• Projects and tasks will stay up-to-date as data is added and/or updated in both Jira and/or Forecast.
• When using Forecast with JIRA, the people scheduling, project planning, estimates, time tracking, and high-level portfolio overview will always be synchronized with the current development tasks and issues.
• Issues, versions, boards, and sprints will be synchronized between Jira and Forecast, and new added and/or updated data will stay up-to-date.

How the integration works

Below is a suggestion as to how Forecast and JIRA can be utilized best together. Whereas JIRA provides a good project management solution, Forecast is a more all-encompassing tool that can help provide accurate data regarding resource management and finances. 

Forecast

• Takes care of the time, people, and budget elements of all JIRA projects.
• Allows for the use of all of Forecast’s planning abilities to alter assignees and due dates on issues.
• Use Forecast to plan sprints, delegate tasks/issues, and leverage that your peoples’ allocation to projects will be your capacity in your sprints.
• Use the timeline on projects to plan a JIRA project using a Gantt approach.
• Use the Forecast resource plan to find resources with the right skill and availability for your issues.
• Lets you make shareable reports, e.g. share your live Gantt chart with your clients.
• Will transform all time registrations into a budget with projections and let you connect this to your accounting system of choice. Thereby reducing manual work and risk of error.
• Use Forecast's intuitive timesheets to register time on your issues and they will automatically be created as work logs in JIRA.

Jira

• It is necessary to create projects in JIRA and choose which JIRA projects to synchronize with Forecast.
• After a project has been synchronized to Forecast, all data changes in JIRA will be automatically sent to Forecast.
• Sprints in JIRA belong to a board, whereas sprints in Forecast belong to a project. Therefore it is only possible to synchronize sprints to and from ONE board per project.
• If you use Tempo Timesheets in JIRA for time-tracking and want to synchronize these to Forecast, please write to support@forecast.app after the integration has been set up.

Data flow between JIRA and Forecast

The picture below shows how data flows between the two platforms. With most data points the connection is bi-directional, with exception of users and projects. 

JIRA and Forecast's task hierarchy

Important: If Task Hierarchy is enabled in Forecast, there are certain limitations to be aware of when moving Jira-linked tasks in the hierarchy in Forecast:

Moving a common issue (User Story, Task, etc.) under another common issue will not have any effect in Jira and will not change the issue type of a task. Moving an epic under another epic has no effect. Moving a subtask issue under another sub-task issue has no effect.

Creating issues with Task Hierarchy

• You cannot create Jira subtasks via Forecast with the new task hierarchy, so any new subtasks will have to be created in Jira. Similarly, if you move a Forecast task to Jira, any nested tasks under that Forecast task will not be moved with it.