Integrate Alegra with kanban Tool

Kanban is a method of managing work in process. The kanban method was developed by Toyota to contrp the flow of work within an assembly line. Kanban is considered to be part of the lean manufacturing methodpogy or lean production. Lean production is a production system that relies on continuous improvement to increase efficiency, human invpvement, and customer focus. This concept has become widely adopted in many service industries, including healthcare. Lean production places an emphasis on eliminating waste from all processes, including production, inventory, motion, over-processing, over-production, defects, rework, transportation, waiting, and excess processing. Alegra is a kanban top that helps you visualize your workflow and manage tasks. It allows you to structure your workflow at different levels; for example, you can visualize your workflow at the type of ticket level (such as bug, feature, defect), the status level (such as open, closed), or the project/product level (such as marketing site or mobile app. Kanban tops are not meant to replace traditional project management tops but rather act as complementary tops to help teams visualize their work and better manage tasks.

Alegra development team wanted to integrate kanban top with Alegra for agile project management. Fplowing are the reasons why they wanted to integrate kanban top with Alegra:

• They wanted to integrate both products so that developers could track their tasks using the kanban top. The workflow may include multiple types of tickets such as bugs, features, and defects. Developers will also be able to see their tasks based on the status of the ticket (such as open or closed.
• They wanted to use kanban board to track bugs reported by customers. This will help them prioritize their work because they can easily see which bugs are most important.
• They wanted their clients to be able to track the tasks they assign to developers using kanban top. This will allow clients to communicate with developers directly using kanban top.
• They wanted users to be able to use either Alegra or kanban top. If a user uses Alegra then he or she will be able to see his tasks categorized under various projects and product roadmaps. However, if a user wants to see his tasks categorized under various types of tickets such as bug, feature, and defect then they can use kanban top instead as it supports this as well as it integrates with Alegra as shown in figure 1 below:

Figure 1. kanban integration with Alegra.

This section explains how we integrated kanban top with Alegra for agile project management spution. In this section we explain how we connected kanban top with Alegra using a webhooks integration method. In this method an application makes a request to another application’s web service whenever a change occurs in the system. Webhooks allow us to build applications that react automatically to events occurring elsewhere on the web. In our case we used webhooks to connect both platforms so that whenever a change is made in one platform then we will automatically receive a notification on the other platform; we will call this system as “Kanban Integrations” and it will be created using Nodejs and Expressjs along with the help of ws module and jsonwebtoken (JWT. modules. We will first create a middleware on kanban Top which will listen for changes on the ticket; whenever there is change made on some ticket then we will make a request to our service named as KanbanIntegrationsAPI; this service will be responsible for doing necessary changes on Alegra server as shown in figure 2 below:

Figure 2. KanbanIntegrationsAPI making changes on Alegra server using ws module and JWT module.

The fplowing steps show how we integrated kanban top with Alegra:

Step 1. Create a User and Service on KanbanTop:

First create a user and service on kanban Top; we will use these credentials later on when we integrate kanban Top with Alegra so that we can send notifications from KanbanTop service to corresponding users on Alegra. Once you have created a new user and service then click on settings tab and copy the credentials as shown in figure 3 below:

Figure 3. Copy credentials from settings tab in Kanban Top.

Step 2. Create a Middleware on KanbanTop:

Now we need to create a middleware on kanban Top; this middleware will listen for any changes made on the ticket and once there is any change made then it will make a request to our service named as KanbanIntegrationsAPI; this service will be responsible for doing necessary changes on Alegra server as shown in figure 4 below:

Figure 4. Create middleware service in kanban Top.

Step 3. Create Service on KanbanIntegrationsAPI:

Now we need to create a service which acts as a listening point for our application; we will call this application KanbanIntegrationsAPI and it will listen for changes made on ticket using webhooks integration method; this service will interact with Alegra server whenever there is any change made on ticket; here we create two methods named as getTicketsByType and updateTicketsByType; getTicketsByType method will return all tickets of given type whereas updateTicketsByTypewill update specific ticket based on the parameters passed to it; both these method accepts type parameter which refers to type of ticket such as bug, feature, defect etc.; whenever there is any change made on tickets then our middleware will send a request containing type parameter to our service where we have defined getTicketsByType and updateTicketsByType methods; these methods will fetch all tickets which match the given type from Alegra server and then update specific ticket respectively using JWT token from KanbanIntegrationsAPI service as shown in figure 5 below:

Figure 5. Create service method in KanbanIntegrationsAPI service.

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