Has anyone tried integrating HP ALM and JIRA ?

HP ALM and Jira can be easily integrated with the aid of a third-party Integration Solution.

To help you select the right integration approach and tool, you should first define your integration requirements and selection criteria. I believe the following are the key must-have considerations as part of the selection criteria:

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  Time consumption: 
  
  
  • Understand whether an interface is to configure the integration of entities or if there needs to be coding/scripting required.
  
  
  • Some tools are a collection of unsupported beta versions of scripts, requiring a very high degree of sophistication. These can be highly time-consuming, error-prone, and can hinder operations. As part of the evaluation, analyze what part of integration may require script and involvement from your side.
  
  
  
  

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  Integration Richness: 
  
  
  • Understand all data the tool can integrate, such as Defects (along with attachments, links, comments, mentions, and inline images) and test management, and the data that the tool cannot integrate. Evaluate the volume of coordination effort among team members required for Sync Reliability and Completeness issues.
  
  
  • If you are looking to integrate data bidirectionally, there is a possibility of data being updated simultaneously in HP ALM and Jira. As part of the evaluation, analyze which tool supports conflict management in such cases.
  
  
  
  

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  Maintenance:

When you integrate user fields like Assignee, Reporter, etc., if the username is not the same, understand whether mapping the users is done dynamically without mapping each user (one by one) or it will be manual mapping. 

 OpsHub’s free Community Edition can integrate standard entities between HP ALM and Jira, It supports the integration of the entities, Defects, Requirement Test Management Data, etc., from Micro Focus ALM to the entities, Bugs, User Stories, and Test Management Dara on Jira. It supports syncing of history, attachments, links, and comments. Customization of workflows and configurations is possible, too.

OpsHub’s Commercial Edition additionally supports the integration of more advanced data and use cases. Please reach out to OpsHub’s Integration Experts for an initial free consultation on integration planning.

Hi Krunal,

Yes, you can integrate HP ALM/Quality Center with Atlassian JIRA bidirectionally.

Hi Paul,

Trying ConnectALL is easy. No legal forms to sign, etc. Just fill out our evaluation request form at www.go2group.com

Make sure that you select ‘ConnectALL ALM Integration Platform(On premise, behind the firewall) ‘

Make sure to use a real corporate email address, and that is it.

You will be introduced to our demonstration team, support team, get your evaluation licenses, etc.

Some useful links:
www.go2group.com
www.go2group.com
www.go2group.net
www.go2group.net

Building the integration isn't the hardest part, we've built a few
integrations from JIRA to other ALM tools and to build the bi-directional
integration can take 2-4 weeks.

However, the most challenging part is standardizing JIRA to make it
consistent, so that when you roll up or integrate your data that the data
actually makes sense. That is fundamentally the biggest challenge with
JIRA, not integrating the two systems, but making sure that the data fields
are mapped correctly can be very difficult if different projects are using
different fields/custom fields and those have different values.

I am using Go2Group's ConnectAll product. It allows us to integrate defects between HP ALM & JIRA. It is running on Apache Web server & Mule Application Server. You can create an application to map between JIRA & ALM Projects ( 1:N or N:1 or 1:1 ). The UI is user friendly and it has tons of options..

Thanks,
Shakul

Synchronizing data between JIRA and ALM is one thing. I think TaskTop and ConnectALL and all other tools can do the trick. In the coming weeks we will do some PoC's to prove the sync. I am worried about something else though: to use the data in ALM, we need relations (like test coverage, requirement traceability, linked entities defects). I think that after every synchronization, these relations have to be added manually. This will be unacceptable for the users, I'm afraid. Does anyone have experiences to share with us?

So I am not worried the existing links will disappear, I am worried that the NEW requirements, defects et cetera won't have any links. That means a lot of manual effort after every sync...

Rob Smit
CI/CD coach

Hi,

I used Tasktop Sync to integrate ALM and Jira for both requirements and defects. Functionally it gave us exactly what we needed (and we had fairly complex needs) but then (2014) the pricing was a nightmare. They took a fee per user which for us was not viable as we had a high number of users creating few incidents. For example a user may create an incident in Jira (req in ALM) per day or every other year but you pay for each user anyway. As we had 5000+ Jira users and high churn of users (many consultants) the pricing got out of control (cheaper but not as good to enter data twice). There were solutions such as being able to re-use named licenses every 3 months but it would have been complicated to administer. There was also a concurrent license but that could only be used once every 4 hours which was therefore a terrible solution. Tasktop were very good to work with though and sincerley tried to create a solution that met our needs and was reasonably priced. I have also used ALM Sync but have heard of many limitation with this.

I am now at another company and will evaluate ConnectALL and Bridge as we simply must have flat pricing. From looking at videos all these products look very similar in how they approach the same need.

ConnectALL pricing is very simple and straight forward. You pay for the licenses based on the application instances you're using to integrate. It may be hard for you to find out the Tasktop sync pricing. For ConnectALL, refer to: www.go2group.com

Refer to what Gartner has to say about ConnectALL here: expert.go2group.com

Hi Zabrina, ConnectALL ALM Router supports "many to one" sync capability. You can request a demo to reflect your use case that will help you setup POC. To simplify your evaluation, you can request for a trial license of ConnectALL after the demo. If interested, request your demo here: www.go2group.com

HPE provides ALM/QC <-> JIRA synchronizer. It is an additional adapter on top of the existing ALM Synchronizer. At the time of this post JIRA versions supported are 6.2.x, 6.3.x, or 6.4.x
Download available from here: hpln.hpe.com

Hi Russell,

I certainly can.

The ability to integrate with Jira is new for HP Synchronizer, and I haven’t used to the integrate the products. I have used it to synchronise HP Agile Manager and HP ALM, and HP ALM to HP ALM, and found it a little cumbersome and the synchronisation period is too long (5 minutes).

IntelliQA is a Certified Service Provider of Tasktop. Our bread and butter is synchronising JIRA and HP ALM using Tasktop Sync. With the product and integration knowledge, the task can be achieved relatively quickly, Tasktop Sync is a powerful tool that is highly configurable and yet straightforward to use. The most difficult aspect is synchronising the workflow because JIRA is event driven, we have a process to achieve this.

Maintaining the integration has two aspects, firstly extending the integration, which is straightforward, and secondly in operating and addressing any anomalies that occur. Tasktop Sync is a production strength product that has been developed and tested over a number of years and it therefore meets these challenges.

If your colleague would like a demonstration the please let me know. We have a full cloud to cloud demonstration capability.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind Regards

Paul Kaye

Managing Director
IntelliQA Limited

Hi here,
Has anyone ever tried Tuleap Enterprise as ALM? www.tuleap.org
We see many companies here implementing Tuleap at rather large scale as it provides all-in-one ALM facilities.
NB: I am oriented. I work for Tuleap team.
Cheers
Laurent

A number of comments here are raising the correct concern.

Setting up the HP ALM Jira integration, using the existing tools is not a major technical challenge. The real challenge is maintaining the environment such that the mapping and transformations are kept accurate.

The Exalate synchronization tool can cover the integration between HP ALM and Jira, but with a different take on ensuring that this maintenance doesn't become a nightmare. Exalate has a distributed configuration architecture such that each side can determine how a common message should be mapped on the local tracker. If anything changes in the configuration, only one side needs to be updated. Configuration change requests can then be processed without involving the 'other side'.

Would you like to know more about our HP ALM to Jira synchronizer? checkout www.idalko.com

I fully agree with Zubin.

After doing two PoC’s with COTS tools, we came to the conclusion that our JIRA and ALM projects used too many blueprints and templates. Almost every project use their own custom fields and workflows, and therefore it would simply take far too much time and effort to set up repositories for all the projects. A central maintained sync tool requires a limited amount of templates/ blueprints.

Before synchronising, start simplifying, is my first advice.
Second advice: nobody is not helped by just replicating bugs. Instead, as a team you would need relationships with the release, sprints, user stories, test cases and test runs.

Furthermore, synchronizing workflows was not in our scope. There are lots of differences in the workflows in many of our projects. We did not want that kind of discussions. It would mean that we would have a tool discussion instead of a simple implementation of a sync tool.

After a thorough evaluation we took a different approach and build a so called point-to-point solution, where a team can set up their own synchronization between their JIRA and ALM projects. The results so far are very good. Our tool synchronizes and can set up an ALM project from scratch with full traceability from sprint to test run and bug. Low maintenance, low costs. It can be done!

Keep it simple. If teams wants to add more custom fields, different mappings, other flows or whatever: offer them a tool they can use and change the way they think is right. We used VBA (MS Office/Excel). Very simple, open, adjustable by the teams, easy to configure. The hard part is not setting up the sync, but implement it in projects without tool discussions (and a bunch of consultants).

Regards,
Rob

Hi, This is the most recent engagement I drove for my Customer but we weren't lucky. Primarily we were looking at open source solutions ! So, the HP ALM COE came up with a manual sync solution, which again wasn't what we wanted. We wanted real time sync, we were offered tools like ConnectALL, which requires us to buy adapters on both sides. One adapter for HP ALM and one for JIRA, which would be licensed separately, which wasn't viable with my customer. Being a DevOps consultant, manual sync is archaic.We are still evaluating different tools and have currently suspended the exercise !

Hi Krunal -

You ask a very important question and it's one we tried to tackle when I worked as an enterprise tester analyst at a large retail company. I have to agree with Zubin on his answer since this is the exact experience that we had. Building the integration wasn't the tough part, it was the constant overhead of making sure our fields were in sync and mapped correctly.

If you are looking to get the best of both worlds with JIRA being your system of record, while testing results are updated against issues in real-time, QASymphony offers an out of the box integration with JIRA that requires no constant overhead. We also offer a way to migrate your HP ALM data into our modern system.

Feel free to drop me a line if you want more information.

Best!

Ryan

ryanyackel@qasymphony.com

It important to considering pricing in your evaluation process. Here's what Air France, Blue Cross, and other customers have to say about ConnectALL for HPE ALM and JIRA integration. www.go2group.com

I have integrated TFS 2013 and HP ALM to transfer the defects between the two entities. Clients are using HP ALM for defect management. They test the product and raise a defects on HP ALM. development team using TFS for their development. This integration helps the management to move /sync the bugs from HP ALM tool to TFS and assign the defects to dev. team. This synchronization is scheduled on weekly basis. This integration went well and it is currently live.

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for your response. I noticed I wasn't clear on my concerns. I added a few lines in my post. I'll explain some further: if ALM receives a 10 new defects from JIRA and 10 user stories, these entities don't have relations with a release, sprint, test cases, runs etc. So in order to keep the set up of ALM properly functioning, we have to add all relationships manually. That's correct, isn't it?

Relationships are not affected by new updates. We used Tasktop but I assume the same goes for all solutions. If you create a "story" in Jira, sync it as requirement to QC and add tests to it in QC those relationships will remain in QC even if you get an update through a sync with Jira. Same goes when you raise a defect in QC which creates a "Bug" in Jira. The link from QC defect to test to requirement (indirect) will be kept even when the Story and Bug in Jira are updated. All the sync does is update via API i.e. not GUI and when updating in QC links are kept of course. I hope I understood your concern correctly and my answer was therefore relevant.

What is the licensing cost of Tasktop Sync ?

We are embarking on an integration with HP ALM 12.5 & Jira and are evaluating products now. We used the go2group product at one point because it presented security vulnerabilities. And we just found out that the HP ALM sync product does not offer a "many to one" sync capability to intake multiple Jira containers into a single and HP ALM project/release. So now we are looking at a product by Orasi to see if it will meet our needs.

We are currently working on setting up a POC to originate a defect in HP ALM, send it to Jira, have the developer fix it/provide a status update, and for that status to be sent back to HP ALM. So within the next 3-4 weeks we will know more.

I would have to suggest the Zephyr plugin or the QA Symphony plugin for anyone considering using JIRA and Agile.

The pricing looks good. Is it easy to use and maintain? What support is available if issues occur?

Could we give it a go? We have our own ALM instance on SaaS and Jira.

Regards

Paul

Please see ConnectALL, it will integrate many JIRAs to many QC/ALM instances, both self hosted and cloud. The cost is listed on the website and is under $10k. That is a flat, unlimited user price.

Hi Russell,

There is a tool called TaskTop which can help you sync both HP ALM and
Jira. Its very user friendly and doesnt require too much technical skills.
Very straightforward and helpful company as well who provide very good
support.

Time wise, its all a matter of setting up a server for TaskTop. Once
TaskTop is up and running, its all a matter of pointing to the correct HP
ALM and Jira environments and mapping the fields you want synced.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

James Wicks

It is not clear what JIRA integrator does HP offer - because they do not have one of their own. Usually, they point to TasTop...but there are others: Orasi and JaM that I am familiar with.
By and large, the procedure is similar across the products: you set up a separate server to host HP’s Quality Center Synchronizer, then add the software (could on the same server - depends on the workload), then you map the fields ( a wizard tries to figure out the matches). Heavy customization of HP ALM might present challenges. But once it is set up, things run rather smoothly, you need to watch out for any changes in the environment.