Is there a way to check or track past information on a ticket for comparison purposes?

Question

Hello!

Here's the situation. We want to be able to check and track information that was changed in a field and be able to compare that information at regular intervals to past iterations of the same ticket. For example:

Let's say I start Sprint A in January and a ticket has fields that are filled out. In Sprint Z in June, we take the same ticket but update that information to be different. We want to be able to look back at past records and be able to say "In Sprint A, it was this, in Sprint B it was this," and so on and so forth.

Is there a way to do this? The biggest caveat is, we do not want to create new tickets to track this information, we want to keep updating one ticket but maintain a record.

Matthew Frassetti_x0jwcs · Answer

Thanks Rachel!

We're currently looking at maybe using a plugin or something else because the goal is to be able to reference multiple tickets (and a lot of them). I've already explored using the issue history and WAS CHANGED JQL but it just isn't efficient enough. Hopefully there is something external we can use that I am just missing in my research.

Rachel Wright · Answer

Hi Matthew,

I don't know of a good way to do what you're asking for multiple issues, but for a single issue, JIRA shows the change history in the "Activity" area at the bottom of the issue's "View" screen.

Further, there are some JQL operators that might be useful for decting change.  For example:  WAS, CHANGED, etc.  Read more here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiracorecloud/advanced-searching-operators-reference-765593718.html#Advancedsearching-operatorsreference-WASWAS  You're not able to use these with all fields however.

Of course, the HTML formatted email notifications do a good job of showing the before and after, but that's not helpful if you want to see multiple changes over time.

So I think that leaves you with using the API or database to parse and display the change history.

Maybe someone else in this community will respond with a better idea!

Good luck,

Rachel Wright