Syncing threads with integrated systems

[ackernaut]

I was prompted to open this by this feedback from this person 🔒 :

It would be great to have the option to leverage the Jira comment infrastructure instead of Parabol's built-in chat sidebar.

Some feedback from my colleague:

‘I worry about the fragmentation of our discussions — seems like the comments in the sidebar don’t automatically get synced over to Jira, which is unfortunate if we’ve collected useful context there’

I see a couple different use-cases regarding Jira comments. One is for reading the existing Jira comments before estimating a ticket. The other for posting new comments back to Jira. One approach might be to add a "Add to Jira issue" option in the context menu for a Parabol comment. Similar to Jira's "Add to issue" Slack message shortcut.

As a general pattern for any integration, I see a few ideas:

• We allow folks to push important comments one way that would make sense in the external context (as mentioned above)
• We allow folks to mirror the thread 100% — perhaps they turn this on as a team meeting setting for poker, or per story, or wherever there’s a thread on an integrated

Using Sprint Poker as an example, I think our intent is that folks have a discussion based on the local activity, but I can see where information may be useful in both places. So I think optionally pushing some comments sounds helpful and less of a lift.

As for reading in comments as part of the context to understand the story, that’s also an intriguing idea. To keep things scrappy Jira should be the source of truth for their story, and we have the source of truth for the pointing activity. For the time being we could push points and important comments. Maybe the important comments shows up in Jira and links back to its source (Parabol) just like the optional score comment we push.

I think the intent of the Jira Story top card is to be a basic reference. We can show the top comment, but they’d have to open it up to dig deeper as needed. Also, any meta on our UI should be actionable e.g. push a score, change a story’s status as ready