This won’t be like our usual “Top-10 of 2018” rating – this one is more sophisticated. Over the summer, we took notice of the emerging and gaining popularity JIRA plugins and now present to you the most promising and functional five ones among them.
1. Zendesk Support for Jira by Zendesk
Released 24th of July, Zendesk Support for JIRA has at this moment been downloaded around 9 thousand times and rated solid 3 stars. There’s not much surprise at such popularity, however, for both Zendesk and Atlassian are leading service software companies, and Zendesk Support and JIRA are among the most popular ticket-tracking solutions around the world; so it’s only natural that sooner or later this extension will be brought to life. The plugin alerts a user about every change within linked Zendesk ticket without the necessity to leave JIRA, and vice versa. You’ll also gain access to ticket info and conversations between the customer and support agent. What is more, you can link more than one Zendesk ticket into JIRA issue and set custom notifications. All in all, this great and free (!) plugin is a must for those who want to work comfortably within JIRA and Zendesk.
2. Planning Poker ® by Lizard Brain UG
Planning Poker is a plugin for Scrum-powered teams who implement the planning method called Scrum Poker. In short – team members white they estimations of the project time and then discuss, thus reaching the consensus. If you want more detail, there’s ton of information on this method at Wikipedia. But this plugin will most certainly be interesting only for those who already practiced the Poker in real life. For the rest, the addon has a multilayer mode, Fibonacci, T-Shirts and custom decks, and IOS support.
3. Intercom for Jira by ToolsPlus
Intercom integration plugin for JIRA is for those users who insist on using Intercom app instead of Atlassian native Stride. The boss calls the shots, as they say, and where’s a demand, there’s a supply, so this plugin has a full right to exist. What’s noteworthy is that it’s not an official Intercom plugin; it was developed by ToolsPlus who then shared it with us at Atlassian Marketplace. The set of features is solid and decent: linking Intercom conversations to Jira issues, re-opening closed conversations when an associated issue is updated and even creating JIRA issues directly in Intercom. The plugin has a good rating and reviews, so the question only lies in how hard to you want to use exactly Intercom.
4. qTest Scenario – Enterprise BDD for Jira by QASymphony Inc.
BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) is popularly accepted as the best way to effectively bring together dev team and management for software development. This plugin from QASymphony Inc. takes your Cucumber BDD collaboration to the next with the features like: a built-in Gherkin editor where you can create, copy, or link features/scenarios directly in Jira; real-time update visibility and auto-complete for tags and steps. qTest Scenario is also integrated with GitHub Cloud, GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket Cloud, and Bitbucket/Stash Server, however there’s still no connection to GitLab repository. The plugin is free and supported, adding up to all the benefits listed above, so if you want to implement a novel solution in your BDD, qTest is a wonderful choice.
5. Deep Clone for Jira by codefortynine GmbH
Deep Clone has a single honest feature – it copies all types of data in JIRA: issues, attachments, comments, work logs, issue links, votes and watchers. You can either bulk-clone them or copy a single item as well as preset actions to make the process even faster. There is a rising demand for it – 185 downloads over 3 months, and it’s only growing. So if you have hard time constantly copying things in JIRA, this might be your rescue.
Polontech has been working with JIRA plugins and Atlassian tool stack in general for over a decade and know everything about addons and plugins configuration, settings and development. Didn’t find the plugin that suits you in the list above? Want to add certain functionalities to the one you liked? Turn to Polontech and we’ll realize your wants!
