Using JiRa for Ticketing and Release Management

[Sanjay Dewal]

Hi all,

we have customers issueing tickets which are handled by the 1st and 2nd level support. In case a modification is necessary we want to create a work item which would be a work order for the development team. While the ticket follows the ticket life cycle. The work item is more or less related to the software development life cycle.

We cannot operate with views of tickets which are only visible to specific users, as there one ticket may result in many work items and many tickets may also result into one work item.

How can I configure JiRa to have these two object types and how can I link tickets and work items. Furthermore there is need that changes for work items are automatically displayed in the corresponding tickets.

Regards

Sanjay

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Um, that's pretty standard. Have a look at the documentation on Issue Types and Workflows. Jira ships with a handful of issue types already (bug, improvement, task, etc) and it's a doddle to add more. You can then tell it "use workflow A for issue type X, workflow B for type Y and workflow C for type Z". And vary that by project.

[Sanjay Dewal]

Sorry, I am not that familiar with JiRa and use the term which we are using. The process is as follows, an issue is posted by a customer indicating that there is for instance an error in the product. We accept this issue and create a work item (which is another issue type) based on the original issue. This work item has a totally different life cycle and thus different status definitions that the issue. So the question is how to create from one issue 1 of issue type A an issue 2 of issue type B can copy the information from issue 1 to issue 2.

[Sanjay Dewal]

Ok that I do understand. How can I now, when a ticket comes in move it to a work item and link it with the ticket? All of the content of a ticket needs to be copied to the work item.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I don't understand the question. What's a "ticket" here? Jira uses the word "issues" to say "something that needs attention", which is what most people mean by "ticket" (which is not the correct English usage, but hey, language evolves).

In other words, when "something needs attention", you should already have a ticket/issue in Jira, and hopefully, the user has created it with the right issue type. So you don't need to duplicate it.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

>Sorry, I am not that familiar with JiRa and use the term which we are using

No need to apologise, I was just trying to say that people use different words for the same things and it's worth bearing in mind when posting. Because I spend so much time with Jira, I often say "issue" and get a blank look before I have to translate into "ticket" because that's what the other person is thinking of.

Anyway, I think you've just said that you are creating a "work item" in Jira somewhere, and sometimes, you want to create an "issue" which has the same information on it, but will be tracked separately. In other words, it's a copy of the original, to begin with, but as work is done on it, it will change, and it will follow a different workflow from the original "work item"

Off the shelf, there isn't an easy way to do that. The most easy way to do it is to use "clone", to create a new "issue". It will be identical, apart from the key and history, and it will have a link back to the original (Assuming you have linking switched on). You'll then need to edit it, changing the issue type from "work item" to "bug" or whatever it should be.

There are plugins around that allow you to do some "clone and move" type things though - I suspect that's what you need?