Branch exists in Bitbucket, but Jira doesn't notice it

[Mark Yagnatinsky]

We have several git repos on Bitbucket Server.  Our rough workflow is roughly like this:

1. Create Jira ticket (e.g. THINGY-123).
2. For every repo affected by the change, create a branch named feature/THINGY-123.

Normally, JIRA is able to find all pull requests related to a ticket, and all branches related to that ticket, and all commits related to that ticket (because we put the ticket name in the commit message).

Today I noticed a problem for the first time.  I don't know how many tickets are affected by this; possibly the one I noticed is the only one, possibly there are many others.

This ticket has several pull requests, some open, others merged.  JIRA knows about all of them.  Likewise, it knew about many commits related to this ticket.

But for some reason JIRA does NOT know about all the relevant branches!  Those branches have corresponding pull requests open that it DOES know about.  There have been commits made on those branches that it knows about.  But it doesn't know about the branches themselves.  (Not all of them at least; it knows a few.)

Any idea what could cause this?  Does it matter whether the branch is initially created with Bitbucket or instead locally and then pushed to Bitbucket?  Intuitively it should make no difference but I'm out of reasonable ideas.

[Mark Yagnatinsky · Accepted solution]

Okay, I'm an idiot: those branches that are "missing" precisely corresponded to those branches that were deleted when the pull request was merged.