Quickstart
Sign up, name your workspace, then follow the three setup steps on Home. Connect where customer reports arrive, connect your code, and your first issue appears on its own.
Setup is three steps, and Home walks you through them in order: connect where your customer reports arrive, connect your code, and see your first issue. Each step ticks when it really works, not when a form is saved. Your part takes about ten minutes; Watari gets your code ready in the background.
Watari reads real customer reports from the tool you connect. If you want to try it before it reads live tickets, connect a sandbox Zendesk subdomain, a test Intercom workspace, or a Freshdesk sandbox first.
Before you begin
You need:
- Somewhere your customers' reports arrive: a help desk (Zendesk, Intercom or Freshdesk) or an issue tracker (Jira, Linear, GitHub Issues or Azure Boards).
- A GitHub or Azure DevOps organization with the repository Watari should search. This page uses GitHub; Azure DevOps works the same way after you connect, see Connect Azure DevOps.
- Owner or admin rights in the Watari workspace. Setup is for owners and admins; a member sees who is setting it up.
Steps
Sign up and name your workspace
Go to watari.ai/signup. Sign up with Google, or with an email address and password. If you use email, click the confirmation link Watari sends you.
Then name your workspace. This is what your team sees in Watari, and you can change it later. You land on Home, where the setup block shows the three steps below.
Your 14 day trial of Growth starts here: up to 3 repositories and 10 Mapped Issues, no card.
Step 1: Connect your help desk or tracker
On Home, step 1 asks where customer reports reach your team. Pick the tool. Each one says who has to sign in:
- Zendesk: a Zendesk admin signs in. Then choose the tag your team adds to tickets for engineering. Only tickets carrying that tag reach Watari. Full walkthrough: Support tools setup walkthrough.
- Intercom: an Intercom admin signs in. Then choose the team whose conversations Watari reads. Full walkthrough: Support tools setup walkthrough.
- Freshdesk: needs a Freshdesk admin on the Growth plan or higher, who adds one Automation Rule that sends tickets to Watari. Home gives you the exact steps to pass on. Full walkthrough: Support tools setup walkthrough.
- Jira, Linear, GitHub Issues or Azure Boards: if your team logs customer problems in a tracker, Watari picks them up there. See Jira, Linear, GitHub and Azure Boards.
Watari reads only the reports you choose, and never writes into the tool to test the connection. Step 1 ticks when the first real report arrives. Until then it reads Waiting, with the time Watari started listening. If nothing arrives for two days, Home says what is missing and gives you the steps for that tool's admin.
Have a real customer ticket open right now? Choose Add a ticket by hand on Home or the Issues page to see your first issue today. It does not count as connecting, and it can use one of your included Mapped Issues.
Step 2: Connect your code
You can do this first, or while you wait for the first report. On Home, choose Connect GitHub or Azure DevOps.
For GitHub, install the Watari GitHub App and pick the repositories Watari may read. If you are not an owner of the GitHub organization, GitHub asks an owner to approve it first. Then, under Codebase, choose Connect repository and pick the repository to search. Your plan sets how many repositories you can connect (three on the trial).
Most repositories are ready in a few minutes, a large one in up to an hour. Home shows each repository with the time left and the branch Watari reads, with a Change link if your team ships from another branch. Watari never keeps a copy of your source code. A report that arrives before your code is ready waits and is matched on its own.
Step 3: See your first issue
Nothing to do here. When a report has arrived and your code is ready, Watari turns the report into an issue and searches your code for it. Step 3 ticks when that search finishes, whatever it finds: a Strong match, a Possible match, no code found, or a report that needs no fix.
You can close the page while you wait. The owner and admins get one email when the first issue is in, and everyone else gets one line in Updates. Home then shows one line, Setup is done, with your first issue and an Open your first issue button, and from then on new reports show up on Home on their own.
Review the draft fix
When Watari finds an issue in your code with a Strong match, it can draft a fix as a pull request in that repository. The issue page links to it.
Open it in GitHub and review the change. You can:
- Merge it through your normal review.
- Ask for changes in a review comment, and Watari updates the fix.
- Close it if the issue is out of scope or handled another way.
Once the fix is merged and live, Watari drafts the update for your customer, and your team approves it before anything is posted.
If a step does not tick
Signing in to a tool did not finish: Connected tools says which tool did not finish and why. When only that tool's admin can approve Watari, it gives you a message to send them.
A repository stops getting ready: Codebase groups your repositories by whose move it is. When reading stops partway, Watari tries again by itself once. If it stops a second time it moves to Your move with a Try again button. A repository that is too large, empty, or reads a branch that no longer exists says so in plain words, with the one thing that fixes it. Do not disconnect GitHub to fix this: disconnecting removes your connected repositories.
A report arrived but no issue appeared: open Issues and choose Not filed. It lists every ticket Watari read and did not turn into an issue, with the reason. A billing question or an account request is not a defect, and a feature request is listed under Requests.
Next: Working in Watari day to day for the screens your team uses every day, or Your first week for what to expect next.