JIRA issue created in error - close/cancel/reuse?

David Herlich

Hi,

I am very new to JIRA and my company is small and its use of JIRA is not particularly robust.  I also realize this may be viewed as more of a philosophical question than a technical one, but my lack of experience with JIRA and lack of knowledge of its features also prompts me to ask this here.

I consider this a "best practices" question.

A teammate created a JIRA issue, then immediately realized he didn't mean to create it, because another teammate had created an issue for the identical problem.

If I read that JIRA issue now, it shows who created it, and the original explanation he wrote, as well as the affected version(s) of our product, and plenty of text explaining the issue was created in error and his advice and suggestion that the JIRA issue number be reused (i.e., the existing JIRA issue repurposed), for the next valid issue that comes along.

Although I imagine this could be done, I'm not sure it should be done.

Affecting my thinking process:

The original info in the JIRA issue (including such things as who created it) does not seem to be possible to edit or delete, making any such reuse of the JIRA issue more confusing and complicated.  This could be overcome too I would expect, but I'm not sure if it's even worth pursuing.  Or even if it's a good idea.

My "outside the context of JIRA" common sense tells me the JIRA should not be reused, but cancelled, or closed, or marked as a duplicate, or a mistake, or something similar.

There may not be a single right answer here, but I would like to know the opinions of folks who might run across such things frequently.

What should be done in a case like this?

And whatever that is, can I do it, or must he do it?

Jack Brickey

First off welcome to the Community where your questions are always welcome.

So in fact you cannot reuse an issue ID, there is no way around that. What you should do is simply set the duplicate as Done (status) and Duplicate (resolution). Further, while there is the ability to delete an issue I almost always advise against doing so. There rarely a reason to do so and it can cause issues.

As to who should close the issue that is more of a team/company call. Generally I run an open ship and allow anyone to transition issues but there are exceptions. If you want to restrict who can close issues you can certainly do this. As an example you might restrict transition to Done by the reporter or by the Assignee.

let me know if you have further questions.