Together, JIRA and Confluence offer a powerful and seamlessly integrated solution for any software project. Together, they can help development teams work faster, communicate more effectively, and keep documentation organized and easily accessible.
There are several good reasons to add Confluence to JIRA Software, but here are five of them:
1. A single place for all your documentation
Every day we encounter a constant stream of high volume work on a software project – product requirements, project plans, white papers, design specs, sprint meeting notes… the list is almost endless. While JIRA is concerned with helping the team plan and follow all the work that it incorporates in the development of the software, Confluence provides a single workspace to organize all this content that is created during the entire journey.
Confluence eliminates the need to store documentation in multiple places such as shared drives or Word folders. With Confluence, we can organize our documentation into spaces for each of our projects or teams and link those spaces to related projects in JIRA.
Each space has a content hierarchy that makes sense, plus spaces are accessible to anyone on the team. That means team members always know exactly where to look when they need something. In addition, integrating new members is easier because all their historical documentation is saved.
2. Break down communication barriers
Finding consensus in software development is not always so easy. Especially when it comes to technical decisions or product requirements. This difficulty is magnified when team members get sucked into email discussion topics where valuable information is buried or context is lost.
Instead of collaborating on design simulations in one tool, development tasks in another, and user stories in something else, you can bring all of this work to Confluence.
Confluence keeps your team in the same orbit. With the requirements plan ready to deliver, we can collect the team’s requirements using the collaborative editor and negotiate details with stakeholders using online feedback. When all the final requirements are agreed upon, it’s easy to turn them into JIRA issues with just a few clicks directly from Confluence.
3. Keep your team aligned all the way
While JIRA ensures teams have standardized workflows to keep their processes running smoothly, Confluence helps us stay aligned on the path, at all times!
Most agile teams go through four main stages when developing software. Here’s how you can use the integrations between JIRA and Confluence to seamlessly transition between them.
4. Time reduction and increased productivity
Confluence helps keep teams productive by automatically incorporating new issues created in JIRA in your related requirements documents, making it easy to keep abreast of the progress of the work in the development team being done in JIRA.
5. Provide visibility to your software projects
Nobody wants to spend their time constantly reporting on the status of their software project. JIRA report templates make it easy for development teams to create ad-hoc reports in Confluence detailing their latest releases in JIRA. You can create a dynamic status report that shows the progress of the current version, or a static changelog that shows what has changed between its latest versions.
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