Add a Jira custom field that functions like comments

Question

We have a particular Jira project that has an odd use case.

Background Info

This project will serve as a catch-all project for all existing products that are in a sustaininment phase and only minor/occasional updates are being performed. There will be many tiny "sustaining projects" associated with this project, and each might have multiple feature issues and bug fixes belonging to it. We were considering making these "projects" using either epics or components.

Each month we want to scrape all of the "sustaining projects" for a status update which will end up in excel (we will likely use the Better Excel plugin for this bit).

The Problem

When people add their monthly updates we do not want to lose the update history. But if they always append text to a multi-line text box based field we can't easily take just the latest update (without some gnarly string parsing) and the text could become quite long.

Some items approaches we've considered:

* Making special issue types just for these reports and grouping them in the epic. This is not appealing because the reports could get mixed up with all of the actual work being done when just viewing the epic.
* Just doing the reporting in confluence. This is unappealing because the data would be in two separate (though related) places.

One thing that would solve the issue is if I could basically have a second comments field on the epic that would be reserved for these monthly status updates. Is there any built in way to achieve something like that?

Does anyone have another idea how we might accomplish this?

Denise Wermager · Answer

We have a similar need where on a daily basis new data is added by the test team in the comments. Those comments clutter the comment tab and more critical info can get lost. We have resorted to a multiline text field solution for now but it would be super if there was a customfield type of "comment" and a seperate tab would show by the comments and history tab that only displayed the entries for that field. We have thought of developing our own solution but have not had resources available to do so thus far.

nwaters · Answer

Danyal, Thank you for the idea.

Our goal isn't necessarily to restrict the visibility or add permissions to who can create the updates. Our primary object is that we want the updates to be added and appended to, and not overwritten.

I like the idea of making a certain comment special in some way, but I am not sure adding a role, and only posting to users within that role does quite what I am after.

Danyal Iqbal · Answer

hi nick,

create a new role in the project called #Monthly Update

add your monthly update as a normal comment by pressing m and click the small lock in the bottom of the comment box and set the comment role level to monthly update. You can adjust the project permissions to allow only a certian group to view/edit a #Monthly Update.