opinions on best way to represent a request form in Jira

Question

We have a request to take a request form that is currently a Word document that gets filled in and then is manually entered into Jira and put the request form itself into Jira. The challenge is that the form has about 20 fields, most free-form in nature, that need to be filled in. Right now when they manually enter the Word document contents they are putting it all 20 fields into the description field. There is some concern about creating 20 custom fields since there won't be any analysis (JQL queries or reporting) done on them since they are freeform. If I could format a field in a table with label/input pairs that the user could fill in that would be fine with user.

So, my question is how have other people dealt with this type of use case, just bite the bullet and use 20 custom fields, or is there a non-addon elegant way to get around that? We're on the cloud so it's not really a performance issue more of a best practices one.

Thanks for any suggestions/experiences.

Jay

Jay Keck · Answer

Hello Angelica,

Thanks for the information on this add-on! I don't think it's going to work in my case though since the user needs to be able to enter everything at issue creation time, not post creation( ideally this should have been a service desk project where the users are customers, but it is a legacy project that existed before SD). But, I could see other use cases for it within our organization, so I'm going to give it a spin in a test project and see how it feels. I really like the benefit of not having to create custom fields for everything and the dynamic nature of the forms.

Regards,

Jay

Angélica Luz · Answer

Hi Jay,

Directly in Jira, there is no option to add a form, the only option is the same that you mentioned, using custom fields.
If you will use only one form, I found a great free add-on that may help you:

- ProForma Lite: Forms & Custom Fields

This add-on is free, but you can create only 3 forms.
I've tested on Jira Service Desk and it's possible to add this form in the customer portal for them to fill and then it shows like this on the ticket:

For a Jira Software form, it does not show when creating the ticket, but it shows directly in the ticket the option to add the form.

Hope this helps!

Regards,
Angélica