The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) and the Project Management Institute (PMI) have been working together for several years exploring the connection between systems engineering and program/project management (link to INCOSE and PMI Survey), but relatively little attention has been paid to integrating the software tools popular in the two domains. Syndeia is trying to change that.

JIRA, an on-line issue tracking service, has enjoyed explosive growth supporting agile software development teams and is gaining traction in managing large system engineering projects. With the growth of agile systems engineering and model-based systems engineering, it is imperative that the system development process is integrated with the system modeling environment and resulting artifacts, such as technical data packages, reports, and simulation results.

Syndeia 3.0 offers a JIRA interface. Like its other interfaces, this allows the Syndeia user to view the contents of a JIRA repository, make connections from SysML elements to specific JIRA Projects and Issues, and open them in JIRA directly from the SysML model. If a simple reference connection is not sufficient, Syndeia can transform JIRA issues into SysML blocks (and vice versa).

Watch a quick video introduction to the JIRA capabilities in Syndeia 3.0

Part 1 of this blog series will explore the capabilities for creating SysML blocks from JIRA issues, using the persisted connections to compare them as they evolve, and integrating the blocks into the system model using dependencies.

Figure 1: Syndeia Dashboard showing SysML model on left, JIRA repository on right

In Figure 1, the Syndeia dashboard shows the SysML model in the left column and a JIRA repository on the right. Two issues, HELLO-7 and PARAMAGIC-31, have been dragged from JIRA into SysML as blocks, with value properties carrying over the issue attributes. The persistent connections between blocks and issues that Syndeia maintains allow us to compare them as the models evolve, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Comparison of SysML block and JIRA issue, after status property has been changed to Open in SysML

As a proxy for the JIRA issue, the new SysML block can be integrated into the model like any other element. In Figure 3, we use a JIRA_Issue-stereotyped block to refine a requirement, while the test case is allocated to it to connect issue tracking and testing.

Figure 3: Dependencies between JIRA-connected block, a requirement and a test case in SysML

In Part 2 of this blog post, we will discuss additional use cases for the Syndeia JIRA connection:
• Multilevel structures in SysML — requirements, blocks or activities — can generate multilevel issue structures in JIRA with a single drag-and-drop operation.
• Right-click a SysML element and see a statistical summary of all the related issues, including how many open or how many assigned to a particular individual.

Related posts:

• Video introduction to Syndeia JIRA interface
• Syndeia and JIRA, Part 1 (this post)
• Syndeia and JIRA, Part 2
• Syndeia and JIRA, Part 3

Contact us at info@intercax.com to request an evaluation license of Syndeia to try out your innovative ideas.

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