Purpose

Echoes can connect to your JIRA Cloud instance and help you tag JIRA issues with their intended outcomes and initiatives they contribute to. This allows you to express the purpose of work during the planning process in JIRA and have related code contributions inherit these annotations, therefore reducing the labelling effort for engineers.

Example of labels inheritance



In the example above, a pull request references JIRA sub-task JIRA-3 in its title. Echoes successively inspects JIRA-3, its parent story JIRA-2, and the parent EPIC JIRA-1, collecting all values of the intent field along the path. It finds an intent on the EPIC and applies the corresponding label to the pull request. This required a single tag in JIRA, and no developer action.

Installation and configuration

Echoes JIRA integration consists of an Atlassian Connect app which only requires read permissions to your JIRA instance. Installation is done through Echoes’ integrations settings.

Echoes integrations



The connect button asks for the base URL of your JIRA instance (e.g., https://mycompany.atlassian.net) and take you to the installation page on the JIRA marketplace. Once installed, you will see custom fields appear on your JIRA instance (you can filter fields on "Echoes" to find them easily).

JIRA custom field administration



Follow the JIRA documentation to add the custom fields to the screens of your choice.

Associating Echoes custom fields to JIRA screens



Enforcing categorization

The "Echoes - Intent" custom field can be made required on issues to enforce categorization. Refer to JIRA field configuration documentation to mark the field as required.

JIRA field configuration



How to use

Once connected to your JIRA Cloud instance, Echoes creates and manages two custom fields:

• The "Echoes - Intent" multi-select field is populated with the outcomes and initiatives configured in Echoes, and is automatically updated as the configuration changes over time.
• The "Echoes - Effort" single-select field is populated with a simple t-shirt size scale.

Creating a JIRA issue with the custom field



Automating code contributions labeling

The "Echoes - Intent" field is used to express the intended outcomes or initiative motivating a JIRA issue (either task, story, or EPIC). Opening a GitHub pull request or GitLab merge request which references an issue (either in the pull request title, the message headline of one of its commits, or the branch name) will automatically apply labels for the corresponding intents without any action from the author.

Labels automatically inherited from a JIRA referenced issue



Accounting for non-coding activity

You may want to account in Echoes for efforts which contribute to goals but don't materialize as contributions in the source code manager. For example, this could be an engineer spending one day investating a production issue, or provisioning resources in your cloud provider. This is the purpose of the "Echoes - Effort" custom field.

Using the "Echoes - Effort" custom field to account non-coding activities



When an issue gets resolved, Echoes accounts for the effort as set in "Echoes - Effort". This field is empty by default, which means that JIRA issues are generally only accounted for through efforts arising from linked GitHub pull requests and GitLab merged requests. Attributing a non-zero value to the "Echoes - Effort" custom field will confer the issue a weight of its own, using the same t-shirt size scale used for pull requests and merge requests.

Usage of the Completion field on JIRA

In addition to the above configuration, to make the best use of Echoes, we recommend that you follow Atlassian recommendations regarding the usage of the "Completion field" on your JIRA issues. Echoes uses the Completion field as primary source of information to evaluate whether a JIRA issue is considered "open", or "closed".

FAQ