Have anyone tried integrating the User Stories here with JIRA (or other Agile tools like Rally, Taiga, Trello, etc…). Is this feature supported in any of the editions?
To be clear, here are my intent:
Ability to generate user stories from the diagrams created (I know this is supported in the premium editions);
Ability to automatically generate user stories in my Agile tool at the same time as #1 (or maybe a click of a button);
Ability to automatically update the user stories in Visual Paradigm with progress (state change e.g. Completed) from my Agile tool.
If it requires a certain kind of programming, I’m all for it as well!
Not just the premium editions mind you (note: I consider Standard and up to be ‘premium’, also because of their price tag). Even the Modeler edition allows you to utilize user stories. However, this is provided through use of Visual Paradigm’s VPository. In other words: you’d be using their online (cloud) service which provides this extra functionality.
Apologies if I sound a bit off here, but I still can’t help wonder: why not simply use Visual Paradigm as an Agile tool? Wouldn’t that solve your problems?
Sure, it’s not free (free as in beer so to speak) because you’ll need a license. But I can’t help think that it sure beats using a “free” tool which “only” shares all your work with the rest of the world (so much for privacy). They claim that its free, but you still pay for its use through other means. Definitely something you should keep in mind here I think.
So to address points 2 and 3: I don’t see that easily happening. The main issue is gaining access to those other environments. If they provide an API of some sorts then this may be theoretically possible, but even then it’s a stretch because you’d basically be asking VP users to help develop extensions for a 3rd party tool
And as a VP plugin developer I simply don’t see the added value to this, no offense.
Apologies if I sound a bit off here, but I still can’t help wonder: why not simply use Visual Paradigm as an Agile tool? Wouldn’t that solve your problems?
Not off and I appreciate the suggestion. If I only have around a few people I could train to use or sell VP as a new enterprise tool, then this option is really viable. I love Visual Paradigm and everything it offers as I used it before (even for personal purpose).
However (sorry if I wasn’t clear in my first post), I’m using an organizational-wide Agile tool (that is not at all free) and is currently being used by around 200+ employees across multiple business areas. Introducing a new Enterprise/Agile tool, going through numerous bosses/processes (for licensing and all), training, and just the learning curve for such is going to be a challenge here. As it took years for the current Agile tool to mature in the company.
Okey let’s just name that the org’s Agile tool is JIRA. And JIRA has a restful API. Is integrating JIRA and Visual Paradigm as simple as developing a VP plugin to interface with the JIRA API for the creation/update of user stories?
Thank you in advance for your responses to my query!
Yes, point taken I can definitely understand that this wouldn’t easily work out.
My bad, I looked up the names of the tools you mentioned in your original post and obviously made a few false assumptions based on that.
Yes, and that should be doable. However, the part I am not fully certain of is how much you can change within VP. I know the VP API provides access to User Stories, I just looked it up and this page shows me that the API supports it (IUserStoryUIModel interface).
My only concern though is that the User Story / Agile support is provided through UeXceler. In other words: using VPository (VP’s cloud). Although the API does provide some access I am not fully certain that this also includes properties such as assignee, tags and the current status. I think it focuses more on the user story as a model element within a certain diagram.
I’ll put this to the test tomorrow (at most Sunday) to see what happens, this is quite an intriguing issue in my opinion. But I do fear that access to user stories within VP could be limited, and as far as I know there is no API for VPository access (but I could be mistaken on that part).
I’ll get back to you, and maybe a VP member will also respond in the mean time.
In the mean time I did some more research on this and I am fairly sure that the VP API only provides access to user stories within their role as model elements. So as mentioned before: it mostly focuses on how the model element is presented in the diagram (such as formatting, and the model elements name) but doesn’t seem to provide access to the functionality (and data) which is provided through VPository.
It might be useful though to have this verified by a VP Team member. I took the liberty of flagging the post to point their attention to it.
Any updates on this. I am also somewhat constrained by tools I can use for Agile Methodology, and JIRA is it. Would love to be able to create the User Story Mapping in VP and from there create the Stories in JIRA for Engineering to work on, I don’t mind at what level they are created (Post Release Planning or before)
You’ve mentioned a lot of different requirements in this post, but I’ll try to give you as much insight as possible.
Okey let’s just name that the org’s Agile tool is JIRA. And JIRA has a restful API. Is integrating JIRA and Visual Paradigm as simple as developing a VP plugin to interface with the JIRA API for the creation/update of user stories?
To answer this, integrating VP with Jira is quite simple and straight forward; as you’e mentioned, Jira has open APIs that you can use and VP has plugins which you can exploit. We use both within the organisation that I work for.
In the past, we had menu tools which automatically generate tasks when selecting a certain IModelElement on a diagram. But we have enhanced our process as of late and now we use the scripting functionality VP provides. We run a series of different scripts at different intervals of the day, that automatically generates Jira tasks such as epic’s, tasks, sub-tasks etc. The purpose of this is that once our architects have modelled a solution within VP, these tasks are automatically generated and then assigned to our developers to work on.
Take a look at the following article about running scripts: Running Plug-in without starting Visual Paradigm
However, we don’t use the user stories functionality that VP provide so I haven’t really looked into automating this. As @ShelLuser has pointed out, it might be limited due to the diagram type. However, if you are able to add “tag” values or something similar to a IUserStory, you could store the automated Jira Id as a tagged value against the user story, and then have a script which can sync with Jira; to update the assignee, status etc.
This probably won’t answer all your questions, but I hope to opens a few new possibilities for you to look into.
Big reason I see to integrate with other issue trackers (jira, azure devops, etc) is because they are not just yet another task trackers, but are a part of continuous integration pipeline. Jira issues have IDs that integrate with version control system, which in turn integrate with build and release server. I can no longer use VP, because I cannot make a git commit in a way that is traceable to/from business requirements planning. Even though VP has superior agile and documentation tools, having to manually sync tasks in VSTS/Jira for git repo to be able to reference commits is not worth the time.
