Automating software version tracking for complaints in JIRA Business Management project

[Jahnavi V]

We currently log complaints as tasks in a JIRA Business Management project. Each complaint includes fields such as:

• Summary
• Compaint description
• Date of complaint
• Location (where the complaint occurred)
• Software version of our device at the location

The challenge is that the locations (our customers) occasionally go through an update of our device's software version. When this happens, all future complaints from that location need to reflect the new software version.

At the moment, we manually update the software version field for each new complaint, which is time-consuming and error-prone.

Is there a way to automate this process so that when a hospital’s software version is updated, all new complaints logged for that hospital automatically use the latest software version? Ideally, this should be dynamic — if the software version changes again in the future, new complaints pick up the new version without manual intervention.

As an added bonus (not compulsory), is there a way to track or check what software version a hospital had at a particular date? For example, if we want to know what version was running when a specific complaint was made.

[Matteo Vecchiato]

Hi @Jahnavi V ,

Welcome to Atlassian community and thank you for your question.

In my opinion, you should play with components (that represents the softwares or modules installed in the hospital) and versions (that represents all the possible sw versions you can have).

There are different ways to implement this requirement. In this case, I think it is better to create an issue type that represents the specific software components installed in the specific hospital; an issue with the following fields: component, version, hospital name, update date.

Each complaint should link to this issue, so when update the issue, you update all the complaints indirectly.

You could refers to the following articles:

https://www.testmanagement.com/blog/2019/06/jira-basics-module-5-versions-components 

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/App-Central-articles/How-to-track-component-versions-in-Jira/ba-p/1368661#:~:text=To%20gain%20better%20visibility%20over,easy%20access%20to%20these%20reports. 

Hope it helps.

Kind regards 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Jahnavi V 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

i see that you are on the Standard plan.

Do you also have the Jira Service Management product as part of your Jira environment?

And would you be willing to consider upgrading to Premium plans, if you do have JSM?

With JSM Premium you get access to a feature called Assets. Assets would be an excellent way to track each location and various information about the location, include the version of the software they use.

Assets keep a history of changes to the asset attributes, like there is a history of the changes to an issue. You could review that history to see when changes to the Version attribute were made to determine what version the location had on a given date.

Depending on how you deploy your versions to your locations, it could be possible to automatically update the Version attribute in the Asset for that Location to reflect that the new version was deployed.

If you are not using JSM, or not open to consider upgrading your subscriptions to include JSM Premium, then there are some more complicated work arounds you could consider.

One such work around would be to use a Project to track you Location information. Each Location would be an issue in that project. You could link each complaint to a Location Issue, and use automation to pull the Version from the Location issue into the complaint issue.

And again, depending on how you deploy software to a Location, it could be possible to automatically update the Version information in the Location issue.

[Jahnavi V]

Thanks @Trudy Claspill

Unfortunately, I do not have JIRA Service Management and do not plan to purchase it. Looks like I'll have to manage with the compliacated work-arounds.