Why do only some of my PRs from Bitbucket appear in Jira?

Question

We are using Jira and Bitbucket, both in the cloud, and have linked the two together. I have seen on multiple issues that only a subset of the PRs I expect to see in the Development panel on Jira are showing up.

I so far have not found a pattern to what appears and what doesn't. It does seem like if the issue key is in the PR title, it always appears. When it is in the commit messages or the PR description, it sometimes appears.

I am not sure what more info to provide, has anyone else run into this? Or any pointers at what to look at that might move me in the right direction? Thanks!

Nancy Chacko · Answer

Ah! yes, the key would be in merge commits for some of these, let me dig a little deeper and see if that's the case. What we are trying to support is merging of feature branches into our main dev branch and then promoting that up through to our production branch - the PR for the feature branches have the key in the name, but the subsequent PRs to the shared branches don't have all the keys in them. They are included in the PR description, but that does not seem to impact anything.

Andy Heinzer · Answer

Hi Nancy,

I understand that you are seeing some pull requests connected to specific Jira issues, but not all pull requests you expect appear when looking at that issue in Jira.

The way Jira is able to make this connection is by searching for the specific Issue Key of that Jira issue in question.  This can appear in commits, branches, pull requests, etc.  More details in Referencing issues in your development work.   How you reference that Issue key can be slightly different between the different element types.  Specifically for Pull REquests:

Pull requestsBitbucket,
GitHub,
GitHub EnterpriseDo at least one of the following:

* Include a commit in the pull request that has the issue key in the commit message. Note, the commit cannot be a merge commit.
* Include the issue key in the pull request title.
* Ensure that the source branch name includes the issue key.

If you create the pull request from the Branches dialog of the Development panel in a Jira issue, the issue key is added automatically.

For example, if you create a pull request that has "TIS-3" in the title, the TIS-3 issue will automatically transition from 'In Progress' to 'In Review'. If you reopen, decline, or merge the pull request, it will also transition the TIS-3 issue accordingly.

You can do this in a commit, but it cannot be a merge commit.  For this reason I feel it is best to include the Jira issue key in the title of the PR itself.   This way you can sure that this PR will appear in Jira.  I suspect that some of the commits could have been merges, which in turn might prevent them from appearing in Jira as expected. I hope this helps to explain the limitations here.

Does this help?

Andy