Is there a way to include recently added comments in summary reporting on issues?

Question

For example, we have features level reporting that includes the status, target end, description, etc. and the POs add comments to the feature based on blockers or progress updates.  I'd like to have the most recent comments included in the summary reporting, but I don't have that fields available as an option.

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Hi @Katie McClure

welcome to the community!

Just adding to @Matthias Gaiser _K15t_'s great answer: If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you'll find options there. E.g., my team and I work on an app in which your use case would be trivial to solve, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a number of so-called smart columns that aren’t natively available, including the last comment, along with many other comment-related columns.

This is how it looks in action:

As you can see above, you can easily sort and filter by the last comment, and also use it across JXL's advanced features, such as support for (configurable) issue hierarchies, issue grouping by any issue field(s), sum-ups, or conditional formatting.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

Joe Pitt · Answer

Jira keeps comments in one cell in the DB so pulling individual comments can't be done. If you're running a script that can examine all the contents and only pass the ones you want it may be possible

Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ · Answer

On the other hand, if you want to rethink your process, you might want to have a look into Advanced Roadmaps which visualizes dependencies and progress better.