JIRA Bots: types of bots available today
The phrase JIRA bot gets used in different ways. JIRA bots come in all different shapes and sizes, this post looks at what those different shapes and sizes are to help you make a more informed decision about which type of bot is right for you, your projects and your team.
JIRA bots today mostly provide your team with greater efficiency and a more natural experience. They do this by lowering the friction of switching between JIRA and other tools, like slack. Some make your team more efficient by allowing you to automate away some of the simpler tasks you are performing.
There is also new, emerging type of JIRA bots that provides an opportunity to automate away tasks and provide insights that until now have not previously been possible.
First, we’ll start with the simplest and most popular type of JIRA bots.
Slack as an interface to JIRA
These JIRA bots provide a new user interface for JIRA via slack. Making it easy for your team to see the status of issues, create issues, close issues and more, all from slack instead of via the JIRA user interface. You could almost think of them as a “slack UI for JIRA”.
For some, this is a blessing. Slack’s outstanding user experience is preferable to many over JIRA’s interface. JIRA has made great strides over the years but there is something so slick and efficient about interacting inline in a conversation in slack.
There are two apps that provide a good example of this type of JIRA bot.
Jirio
Using slack’s slash commands Jirio lets you create, manage, and view issues in JIRA. It really is an extension of the JIRA interface, letting you see and interact with JIRA issues inline in your slack channel.
If you are interested in learning more you, go to Jirio’s site.
Nextup
Nextup also lets you see and interact with JIRA issues inline in your slack conversations but it does so using a bot and natural language. Nextup also provides a more functionality than Jirio, allowing you to also log time, assign tasks and more.
If you are interested in learning more, go to Nextup’s site.
Custom JIRA bots based on hubot
The good folks at Atlassian have released a bot framework called ??? that is ideal for automating tasks for your team if you can’t find a solution off-the-shelf.
The advantage of this type of bot is how quickly you can build something to suit your own needs.
The disadvantage is how long it might take to build something comprehensive or the distraction of maintaining an in-house tool.
If you are leaning towards this route here is some inspiration with examples of what others have done:
- A bot that forwards JIRA comments to slack
- A bot script that randomly assigns an assignee
- A bot script for logging hours on JIRA
Intelligent JIRA bots
There is also a wave of JIRA bots that focus on combining the functionality of JIRA and communications tools like Hipchat and Slack to deliver new functionality that is starting to look like valuable artificial intelligence.
Let’s call these intelligent JIRA bots.
Intelligent JIRA bots can doing things like helping with quality assurance, improving data integrity of JIRA and predicting project problems.
stratejos (that’s me!)
Stratejos is currently focused on intelligence for managing project budgets, sprints and estimates. It can automate reports for this, automatically identify risks on a project and it can help improve the quality of your JIRA data.
Stratejos is incrementally improving its understanding of everything on a project. For example, we recently added metrics around team performance.
Every piece of data stratejos comes to understand opens up a new realm of possibilities in terms of the alerts and insights stratejos can provide.
Checkout stratejos, the project management AI, by visiting stratejos.ai.
