The first step is to create an application link between your Jira Service Desk instance and the Jira Software instance. You can refer to the Integrating Jira with other Jira instances recipe in Chapter 7, Integrations with Jira, for detailed information. If you have already integrated both Jira instances, you can skip these steps:

1. Navigate to Administration > Applications > Application links.
2. Enter the Jira Software instance's URL, and create the application link. Jira should automatically detect the target application as Jira. If, for some reason, it does not do so, then make sure you select Jira as the Application type when prompted:

Once you have linked both Jira instances, the agent and/or collaborator will be able to link the request in your service desk to the issue in the engineering project:

1. Browse to the request in the service desk.
2. Select the Link option under the More menu.
3. Select the Jira Software instance from the Server drop-down list.
4. Choose the relationship between the request and issue. Usually, you should use the is caused by option.
5. Select the issue to link to the request. You can type in the issue key directly if you know it; otherwise, you can click on the search for an issue link to run a search.

6. Make sure the Create reciprocal link option is checked so that a link will also be created for the issue. This will let the engineers know that there is a customer request pending on the resolution of the issue, and will help the engineering team to prioritize their tasks.
7. Select the Internal comment tab if you want to add a comment to provide additional details to the agent working on the request. Comments added in this way will not be visible to the customer.
8. Click on the Link button to create the link.

The screen looks like the following screenshot:

Now let's take a look at how these steps work.