Integrating Atlassian JIRA and Microsoft Project

If you have a Microsoft Project plan that you want to export to JIRA, or you have a set of JIRA tasks that you want to save to Microsoft Project (usually either for resource planning or for reporting), you can use the following guide.

First, install and start Task Adapter. Then follow these steps:

Create a config

To export tasks from a bug tracker like JIRA or a Microsoft Project file, you first need to create a “synchronization config” which will keep settings like your JIRA server URL, login, password, your Microsoft Project file location, etc.

Use “New Config” button on the main application page to create a new config.

Create config

Select two systems (Atlassian JIRA and Microsoft Project in this example). These will be called “endpoints”. It does not matter if you get JIRA on the left side and Microsoft Project on the right in your synchronization config, or the other way around. You can transfer tasks in either direction anyway. Once you click “Create” button, a new config file is created in your data directory (/.taskadapter folder).

Configure.

Sample Atlassian JIRA and Microsoft Project configuration:

Default JIRA - Microsoft Project screen

Click “Fields mapping” to open this dialog:

Edit config for Atlassian JIRA and Microsoft Project

“Fields mapping” panel is used to map fields between two endpoints. For example, you can map “Task Type” JIRA field to “TEXT20” custom fiels in Microsoft Project (since that one does not support Task Types).

You can click one of these big buttons to configure your endpoints:

Edit JIRA Edit Microsoft Project

Configure Atlassian JIRA settings: * project info * query ID if you want to load data from JIRA * some optional system fields set when saving data to JIRA * priorities mapping (name - numeric value) to support different priority names in various systems

Edit Atlassian JIRA settings

Here’s the complete description of the JIRA configuration dialog.

Close the JIRA configuration panel. Now click “Microsoft Project” button to open the project settings. Provide the file location -

Edit Microsoft Project settings in Task Adapter local mode

(This is the panel you see when you run Task Adapter in “local” mode. The server mode is a bit different.)

Now close the Microsoft Project panel. You’re back to “Edit Config” screen. Select task fields you want to export.

You can change default mapping for some of them. E.g. JIRA’s “Due Date” field can be saved into “Finish” or “Deadline” field in a Microsoft Project file. See Microsoft Project configuration page for more details.

Edit config for Atlassian JIRA and Microsoft Project

Export tasks.

Click arrow-buttons to start export to the left or right system: Export left right

A confirmation dialog is shown when the tasks are loaded from the source system:

Export confirmation

You can change fields mappings before the export. The export result will be shown on the next page with the number of tasks created or updated.

Open your JIRA web page in the browser to see the new tasks:

Update MSP File

Link to this page

You can update a Microsoft Project XML file with the data from an external system (Redmine/JIRA/MantisBT).

Similarly to “create” operation, you can also update tasks that were previously created by TaskAdapter.