JIRA Studio + Google Apps - Chat integration
Wednesday, 04 August 2010 16:00
When you integrate JIRA Studio with your Google Apps domain, you unlock several features that are only available in this flavour of Atlassian's hosted software development suite. Previous posts highlighted single sign-on using your Google Apps domain account and the JIRA Studio Activity Bar.
This post will focus on the Google chat features available in JIRA Studio.
Chat++
Real-time chat is a critical tool for software developers to collaborate. Whether it's a dedicated IRC channel or an XMPP-based system like Google Chat, developers have long used real-time chat systems to solve problems together as quickly as possible.
JIRA Studio's Activity Bar includes integrated Google Chat, allowing you to chat with anyone in your contact list (inside and outside your Google Apps domain) who is currently online.
JIRA Studio provides more than just basic chat functionality - There are several clever features that can save you valuable moments every day as you work with colleagues to build your software. Let's take a look at a few of the most useful features.
Share What You're Looking At
Every item in JIRA Studio, from comments on an issue or wiki page right down to an individual line of code in a specific revision of a source file, has a unique, durable URL. This allows you to communicate very precisely with your teammates as you build software, troubleshoot bugs, etc.
JIRA Studio's integrated chat feature includes a 'link' button which automatically pastes the URL of the page you are viewing into your chat conversation. Using this button saves valuable moments several times a day and ensures that you send your teammates a URL to exactly what you are viewing!
Highly Targeted URLs to Your Code Base
JIRA Studio includes Atlassian's FishEye source code browser, which indexes all the code in your hosted Subversion repository and provides durable URLS to any
- folder, branch or tag
- source file
- line of code
- changeset
- diff view
- even a specific line of code in a specific diff view!
Your team can get incredibly precise as you chat about your code and changes during development or debugging. You can confidently share URLs back and forth knowing that everyone is seeing the same view of your source code history.
Chat with your Build Server
When your build breaks, you want to know right away, and IM notification is a great way to get your attention. JIRA Studio includes Atlassian Bamboo for continuous integration, and features a 2-way IM communication feature that only allows you to receive notifications of build results, but also allows you to add comments to build results by responding using the unique build result key.!This is especially useful for fixing broken builds. On most teams, several people receive the broken build notifications, but usually one person is responsible for the change that broke the build.
By quickly IM'ing a comment you can let teammates know you're investigating the broken build, and save others from duplicating the effort of figuring out what happened!
These are just a few of the ways you can take advantage of Google chat integration within JIRA Studio. Have you found other useful ways to take advantage of chat in JIRA Studio? We'd love to hear 'em!
Read more: Atlassian Dev Tools Blog
