How to add customer-specific serial numbers in issues

Question

We have multiple customers and I need to be able to add a customer-specific serial number to each issue added for each individual customer.  Each customer must have their own sequential serial numbers that identifies who the customer is and the customer-specific development item number.  Ideally these need to be automatically generated.  Each customer-specific serial number needs to be unique.

This will help us track how many issues have been added for each different customer and act as a customer-specific development task or bug reference number.

We have only recently started to use Jira (Cloud) for managing our software development, so it's a good opportunity to get things right from the start.

So far, I have manually added customer-specific serial number as a label, which consisted of 3 letters (based on the customer name), a hyphen and sequential numbers (e.g. THD-01, THD-01, etc.).  This hasn't worked as it:

* Is open to errors and inconsistent labeling & risks not being a unique serial number
* Resulted in many many different labels being created instead of a core set of labels
* Is ineffective for searching
* Is ineffective for tracking all development work carried out for individual customers.

I have also introduced a label naming convention to help us search and track issues by:

* Customer name (or by our company initials if non-customer related)
* customer-request (or internal if non-customer related)
* product name/s.

Can anyone help please?  Thanks

Ubaid Eusuf Zai · Answer

hi @C.G.

Hope youre doing well.

Saw that you were trying to do similar to what I am trying to achieve.

Did you manage to solve the automatic serial number generation somehow?

My question is here below in case you were interested.

Confluence template for generating invoice with au... (atlassian.com)

Regards,

C.G. · Answer

Thanks @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- I'm currently using a select list for the customer names, although it sounds like a good idea to switch to using coding as the number of customers is growing.  What coding do you use?

The serial number aspect I'm looking for is to have a way of recording how many issues have been added overall for each individual customer, and as a reference number that can be used when communicating with customers.  We use the Jira created issue numbers internally within the business; however, they are project-specific for product development rather than customer-specific (and customers wouldn't understand them).  All our customers have our core products, which we continually enhance based on customer feedback and requests.

I need to automatically generate some sort of sequential reference.  For example, Customer 1 needs their own sequence of reference numbers that shows the issue is for that customer and it's the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc. issue done for Customer 1.  Then Customer 2 also needs their own sequence of reference numbers that shows the issue is that customer and it's the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc. issue done for Customer 2.

Any suggestions?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

The best thing to do here would be to have a select list that contains all of your customers (for the humans, it would be better to name them, rather than use a serial number that we'd then have to look up).

A select list does not work so well if you have a large number of customers though.  If you do have a long list, then I'd recommend thinking of some coding.  My company has a project for customers with each issue in it representing an organisation that we think of as a customer and then we have a plugin that provides a field that allows us to select an issue in the customers project, and a panel that displays the more important fields from that project in an issue that has it set.