Can I automatically pull the repo name into a Jira ticket field?

Sean Drummy

My team would like to track which Bitbucket repos needed to be changed to address a ticket in Jira. For instance, if a bug fix requred a change to the frontend and the service layer, we ideally have the names of the repos "frontend" and "service layer" automatically pulled into the ticket. It's helpful on a ticket level, but it's also great to run a report to say "give me the components for all tickets for release v5.5" Maybe there's a smarter way to do this and my approach is all wrong.

Clicking through to view Pull Requests and then into Bitbucket is too cumbersome as we're wanting to create a report that we run as part of our release checklist when we prep for our releases. We had the idea where we would pull the name of the repo into the Jira ticket so we can report on which of our repos need updating come release time. Currently we manually enter this data into the components field. 

Is there a way to automate this or some other method that makes it easy for us to know that for version X these repos have been updated based on the Jira tickets that that release has been assigned. 

Andy Heinzer

Hi Sean,

If I understand your request here you want to be able to see the repo name that this Jira issue is linked to somewhere in an issue field within Jira.

I should be up front that I have not found a way to do this yet.  But I wanted to share with you some of the details about what I have looked at here so far.

It's pretty easy to find issues in Jira that have some development data linked to them when following Advanced search reference - JQL developer status.  You could do an advanced JQL search for any of the following:

• development[pullrequests].all (or .open) > 0
• development[commits].all > 0
• development[reviews].all (or .open) > 0
• development[builds].failing > 0

This can return to you any issues that have branches, pullrequests, or commits, etc.  If you were to export as CSV all fields for even one of these issues, you could see more about what information Jira already has about this bitbucket data.  However upon closer examination of that data, I cannot find the repo name anywhere within that specific data entry. 

My thought was if we could find this data somewhere within that field already, we could then use Jira Cloud's automation and Use smart values to manipulate text strings in order to try to extract that value into just a single field.  But that isn't possible yet either because we can't access this development field directly via automation.  That field exists on the issues in the CSV export file, but it isn't the same as standard custom field in Jira, so it isn't accessible in the same way.

I did come across an existing feature request over in JSWCLOUD-18873.  Which is related to this, it seeks to be better able to see the repo name from Jira itself.

Researching this topic some more, I came across Repository tags.  Now, I'm no an expert in git, but it feels like the use of these tags might be a helpful means to try to mark release versions so that you could try to see this information in bitbucket better.  I understand that this might not help you see the Jira issues that might be in that release better, but it feels like this approach might be one way to try to better organize repos here.

Sorry this probably isn't what you are looking for exactly, but honestly I can't seem to find a way to do this either just yet.

Andy