Is there a Q & A add-on for Jira cloud?

Question

I've found quite a few Q & A plugins for Confluence, but we have need of one for Jira. I found this one, which looks like exactly what we need, but it's only available for Server. Any recommendations for add-ons that will allow us to track discrete questions and answers on a Jira ticket?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Oh gods, that's massively overcomplicating what an issue tracker is for.  For the vast majority of people, the comments should be more than enough.  When you're throwing vast amounts of conversations into an issue like that, it's time to put it in a proper documentation system, not some untracked threads.  (Midway between "easy to use issue tracker" and "document it properly" there's lots of room to do the questions as sub-tasks though)

Esther Strom · Answer

Well, yes, if it's generalized information you're looking to share, and if you're using Jira only for "task tracking".

I work for a software dev company, and we use Jira as a complete Agile planning system - our tickets are not simple tasks; they can be epics, stories, and defects.

We're looking for a way to deal with questions and answers asked in the process or working with a specific ticket in Jira - i.e. someone assigns me a story to add specific functionality to my client's website. Right now, we communicate internally with developers, QA, product owners, customer support, project managers, and business analysts. That can result in a huge, messy comment chain that people have to search through to find information.

We'd like a way for a developer, for example, to ask a specific list of discrete questions about the ticket and requirements, and be able to track whether those questions have been answered, and for it to be easy for other users to find questions and answers, rather than having to read through 30 or 40 comments. (We have a distributed workforce, so saying, "just talk to people" doesn't work; even if it did, these kinds of questions and answers need to be documented for future reference.)

Telling people that if they want this functionality, they need to create a Confluence page for every ticket that has questions is just asking to be burned at the stake. And it's ridiculous that you'd have to. It seems like this should be pretty basic functionality in a ticketing system.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Not really, most Cloud users go to Confluence for questions, it's more natural in a system built for sharing generalised information rather than task-tracking.