Import from Jira

This page helps you bring a Jira Cloud project into By Dawn. At the end its issues are By Dawn tickets, its epics are By Dawn epics, and, if you chose to keep syncing, the two stay in step until your end date. Import and sync explains the steps every tracker shares, so this page covers only what’s particular to Jira.

Before you start

• You need to be a project admin in By Dawn, and an org admin has to approve By Dawn’s app (see Before you start).
• The grant acts as the person who approves it. Atlassian has no separate identity for an app, so By Dawn works in Jira as that Atlassian account: it sees what the account sees, and its changes show under that account’s name. Use a dedicated account, such as a saw-bot user, if you don’t want By Dawn’s changes under your own name. The account needs to browse every project you want, and to sync both ways it also needs to edit issues, add comments and move issues through their workflow.
• Only Jira Cloud is supported (https://<your-site>.atlassian.net). Jira Server and Data Center aren’t.

Connect

1. Sign in to Atlassian as the account By Dawn should act as.

2. In By Dawn, open Settings › Import & sync › New import, pick Jira and choose Connect.

3. Atlassian shows what By Dawn asks for: to read and write Jira work, read users and manage webhooks. Choose Accept.

4. Atlassian sends you back to By Dawn. If your account can reach exactly one Jira site, By Dawn connects to it. If it can reach several, By Dawn lists them, so pick the one to import from. You can’t switch sites later on the same connection, so to use another site, start a new import.

By Dawn sets up a Jira webhook for the connection when a sync starts, and removes it when the sync ends. You don’t create one in Jira.

Pick what to bring

• Project: every issue in one Jira project. Choose this if you might create tickets in By Dawn that should appear in Jira, because a new issue needs a project to go into.
• JQL query: any set of issues a Jira search can find, such as project = PROJ AND updated >= -365d. Leave out ORDER BY: By Dawn pulls in order of last update so that it can carry on where it left off.

How Jira maps

• Statuses. By Dawn proposes a column from each status’s category: To Do statuses go to a to-do column (or the backlog, if the status is called something like Backlog), In Progress statuses to a building column (or review, if the name mentions review or QA), and Done statuses to a completed column.
• Priorities. Highest → Urgent, High → High, Medium → Medium, Low and Lowest → Low. A custom priority has no default, so map it yourself.
• Epics. Jira epics (and any issue type above the standard level) become By Dawn epics, and the issues under them join the epic. An epic’s own parent, such as an initiative, is kept in the import details.
• Sub-tasks become sub-tickets.
• Sprints. From the project’s Scrum boards. An issue’s active sprint, or else its next one, can become a cycle or a sprint: label.
• People. Jira hides many people’s emails behind its privacy settings, so expect to pair some people by hand.
• Descriptions are converted from Jira’s rich text to markdown. Panels and macros with no markdown equivalent become a quoted block labelled with what they were, so nothing is dropped.

When you sync both ways

By Dawn writes back the title, description, status, priority, assignee and labels, plus new comments. Due dates come from Jira but aren’t written back.

• A status change goes through the issue’s own workflow, the way a person would move it. If no transition leads from the issue’s current status to the one you mapped, the change is listed as a problem on the connection rather than forced.
• Jira labels can’t contain spaces, so By Dawn writes needs review as needs-review.

Note

New tickets you create in By Dawn are created in Jira as Task issues, and only on a connection scoped to a project.

Where to go next

• Import and sync: conflicts, pausing and ending a sync.
• Words we use.