Can you create an issue associated with many projects?

Question

I understands it is possible to

* MOVE an Issue from one Project  to another
* LINK an Issue to another Issue in the same Project
* CLONE an Issue within a Project

But I don't know whether it’s possible to LINK or CLONE an Issue between Projects (ie, have one issue apply to multiple projects). We are currently using JIRA to track our software, and are considering using it to track our Change Requests and would need this feature.

Many thanks

Joe Pitt · Answer

You can link to issues in different projects. For instance you could have a project tracking change controls and link all the issues from different projects related to it. That gives you one issue to report on to management and a way to see everything connected to the main issue.

Julia Creighton · Answer

Thanks so much, Jaime. It occurred to me that I could create a Project called "All Projects" and create the Issue there, then link the issue to affected documents, but that's a work-around that could cause trouble down the road.

We are using JIRA successfully in a small software development work group at my company and I have been tasked with determining whether it would be workable to replace our outdated Change Request tool to deploy company-wide. I really appreciate Atlassian's ethics and would love to recommend JIRA, which seems like a flexible and intuitive tool. But I'm concerned about this particular issue (maybe trying to force a round peg into a square hole). Do you know of other customers who use JIRA for this purpose? We have multiple projects and products and documents which we want to write changes against and be able to track new versions for the documents as changes are made and approved. Do you see a solution here? Thanks for your kind attention.

Jaime S · Answer

Hi, Julia.

An issue can only belong to one project. So you cannot have issues in more than one project.

You could clone an issue (it'd be in the same problem), move the clone to a different one and link them together. Still, any changes made to one would not reflect in the other, so you'd possibly need to keep updating them.

Kind regards,
Jaime Kirch da Silveira
Atlassian Cloud Support