Using Confluence as a Frontend for Jira

There are many reasons why you should use both of the Atlassian tools together - Jira and Confluence. The integration brings a lot of benefits: you’ll be able to organize project documentation in one place, you’ll foster better cross team communication and finally you’ll be able to create user-friendly reports generated from your live-data in Jira. And there are many more advantages in the combination of Jira and Confluence. But what about using Confluence as a highly customizable frontend for Jira? Have you ever thought about it?

Don’t get me wrong: we all love Jira! … until it comes to a requirement to customize some of the issue screens, f. e. because your Marketing or HR department are “Jira-ready” and would like to get rid of those corporate PDF forms sent via email across the company. So you have probably already heard these sentences from your colleagues:

“We need ALL of those fields from the corporate form XYZ on the issue screen!”,
“Please make field B dependent from the chosen option in the field A.”,
“We have to put here some field explanations... a tooltip would be cool.”,
“Can we put those fields into 2 columns?”
“Gosh, this is too much vertical scrolling … and there are too many tabs”

etc…

Well. That might be quite frustrating to see that Jira is not a forms management tool. The possibilities to provide user-friendly, interactive and dynamically structured input forms and frontends in Jira are limited. Without some specific Jira addons like ScriptRunner, Dynamic Forms for Jira etc. it won’t be even possible. And finally we have to be careful with the custom fields in Jira.

So what could be the solution?

In my presentation I’d like to talk about the Addon for Confluence: “ ConfiForms - Data Forms & Workflows ”. I’m gonna show you some use-cases from DKB AG and will explain how we are using ConfiForms to:

• avoid the issue screens (forms) limitations in Jira,
• build customizable, interactive and dynamically structured user-input frontends
• for Jira in Confluence,
• and significantly increase the acceptance of the Atlassian platform in DKB

About DKB

Deutsche Kreditbank AG ( DKB) , with approximately 4,148 employees and total assets of EUR 83.8 billion, is one of Germany's top 20 banks. Our products are leaders in the market and are distinguished by fair terms. We serve more than 4.3 million clients. They are able to conduct their banking transactions com- fortably and securely online using the latest

technology. Entrepreneurial and sustainable actions are of great importance to us: this is why we use around 84% of our net assets for loans, such as for the construction of apartments suitable for the elderly and families, energy-efficient real estate, outpatient and inpatient health facilities, and for construction projects in schools and day-care centres in Germany. With client relationships built on a foundation of sustainability, DKB is a market leader in many of these sectors, and has been for some years. Since the financing of a first wind turbine in 1996, numerous renewable energy projects in the wind, solar and water sectors have been realised with DKB as a banking partner.