Jira Comments History: How to See Edits and Deletions

[#1]

The majority of teamwork occurs in Jira comments. Updates are shared, things are clarified, and decisions are made directly within the task. However, there are cases when comments are edited or even removed, and that can be confusing.

Suppose you read some critical comment yesterday, and now it is different or not there at all. Who changed it? What did it say before?

Tracking comment history in Jira is helpful for:

• Project managers who want accountability.
• Developers and testers who need context for changes.
• Compliance and audit teams that are responsible for maintaining a comprehensive record of all communications.
• Everyday Jira users who just want to understand what changed and avoid confusion in daily work.

In this article, we will explore Jira's insights into comment edits and deletions, understand the limits, and demonstrate how to utilize the Issue History for Jira app to gain a comprehensive view.

Why Tracking Comment Changes in Jira Matters

Comments in Jira are not simply casual notes. They are an important part of decision-making related to the performance of any task. This is why the ability to monitor their edits and deletions can significantly benefit teams:

• Accountability -  Once you know who edited or deleted a comment, there is less confusion. The full story can be viewed by anyone.
• Transparency - Teams do not forget what was previously discussed. Employees can still know how the conversation progressed even though something has been updated.
• Compliance - In the case of finance, health, or government industries, maintaining an accurate record of communication is not a choice, but a legal obligation.

Put simply, in the absence of a clear history of comment changes, teams run the risk of misunderstanding, wasted knowledge, and non-compliance.

Native Jira Functionality

Jira provides limited visibility into the changes to comments by default. You may see that something has been edited, but the information is quite minimal, and there is no tracking of deletions.

Comment Edits

Jira shows the comment that has been edited. The disadvantage is that Jira shows only the latest version of the comment. The whole history of editing cannot be accessed, nor can the previous version be compared.

Comment Deletions

Once a comment is deleted in Jira, it is gone forever. 

With Jira native functionality, there is no visible record of what was deleted. Using the History tab in every Jira work item, you can only see that the comment was deleted and who was responsible. But you won’t know the details. 

It may be a problem in teams where the comments are a component of their documentation or decision-making process.

💡 Practical Tip: Rather than deleting comments, invite your team to leave them there and write an additional explanatory comment below. The other alternative is to use formatting such as strikethrough to indicate that the old comment is no longer relevant, while still maintaining context.

How to Track Comment Changes in a More Reliable Way

Jira native tools don’t provide a complete view of comments edits, or deletions. This is why the Issue History in Jira app is used by many teams to get complete visibility.

With Issue History for Jira app, you can:

• View any comment edits and deletions.
• See who changed and when the change occurred.
• View the changes in a simple table format, which is easier to read than the history in Jira.
• Quickly find information that you need by filtering by user, project, or date range.
• Export comment history (CSV/Excel/PDF) to use in reporting or compliance requirements.

To get the comment history and export it, after Issue History app installation and the activation of the tracking comment changes functionality, you need to do the following:

1. Open the Table view.
2. Use the filter by project, assignee, sprint, etc.
3. Choose "Updated by Any user" or select the specific users if needed.
4. Set the required date range.
5. In the Columns menu, choose Comment. 
6. Get such a report:

7. Export report easily.

If you just need to track comment changes related to one specific work item, you can use Panel View of Issue History for Jira app. There, you can choose the required date range and use a Field filter to see the changes related only to the Comment field. For example: 

💬 Track comment edits and deletions in Jira
Get a complete history of comment changes with Issue History for Jira.

Try on Jira Cloud →  ·  Try on Data Center →

Summing Up

Jira provides only a partial view of the edits and deletions of comments, enough to see that something has changed, but not what and why. This may create gaps in teams where transparency, accountability, and compliance are important.

Issue History for Jira app fills those gaps with a complete, easy to read history of all comment changes, powerful filters, and export. It is the easiest method to have a complete reliable record of the changes happened to Jira work items.

[Nicolae Victor Rusu]

Is there a way via a Confluence page to automatically pull a list of Jira tickets (Features or stories) that will show an aggregated table view of let's say7 Features that are in progress and for each of the Features it will show the last 3 comments not just the last comment ?