Canvas SN-Jira Integration Retrospective

What went well?

• Pair testing with Donal and SN team was productive for quickly identifying bugs and issues (KH)
• It’s in production
• Tom from ServiceNow was really fast to troubleshoot errors with Donal and Gabriel from Workato Customer Success team was really helpful with recipe building.

What was a challenge?

• Template may not have been clear (KH)
• Unfamiliarity both with Jira and SN (KH)
• Workato pre-built functions had limitations. Had to utilize HTTP calls or workarounds (customization to Jira or SN)
• Limitations on what can be in the trigger of workato.
• Hardcoded values in the workato recipes: URLs, Sys IDs, Service Name, etc. As names can change over time or from one environment to the next, finding where to update these things can be troublesome.
• Workato Recipes were massive since it required many steps. This made it hard to look back at and see which block of steps does what. Even with commenting, sometimes related steps can be overlooked. One step can use stuff from another step that might be at the top.
• Errors are sometimes not descriptive enough, hard to figure out the root cause.
• Matching Users from Jira and ServiceNow. Searching Jira users is limited to using their username which by default is email without the @ and after.
• Workato community only had one useful recipe to use as reference which was to set up attachments. Customer Support team was really helpful but still not much resources to use as reference for our use cases.

What should we do next time?

• Utilize properties tool on workato for hardcoded values. Properties are name value pairs that are searchable on all recipe. If value ever changes then you will only need to change it on the properties which will then update across all recipes
• Utilize callable recipes. Recipes with massive amount of steps can be broken up into callable recipes which can focus on one function.
• Having someone on ServiceNow team participate early on after initial analysis and requirements gathering would be helpful to ensure we are not building towards something that isn’t allowed or recommended.