How to create custom issue history reports in Jira

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Being flexible is a highly-estimated characteristic in our world, even when we are speaking about reports. In the dynamic landscape of project management, the ability to adjust everything to the specific requirements greatly helps. Issue history reports can provide comprehensive insights into the journey of your issues. And it’s always great to customize those reports. In this article, you’ll find out how to create custom reports with Issue History for Jira.

What are custom issue history reports?

Custom issue history reports in Jira are tailored data and analyses that provide a detailed lifecycle of individual issues within a project. Unlike standard reports, which may offer predefined metrics or summaries, custom reports allow you to organize everything your way — select dates, set filters, choose fields, and add columns. Those reports for issue history offer a granular view of the changes, transitions, and interactions each issue undergoes over time. 

It can be a very specific report for one field or a comprehensive summary of all past activities in your projects. Some examples:

• Status transitions history: Details about when an issue transitions from one status to another, such as from "To Do" to "In Progress" or from "In Progress" to "Resolved".
• Assignee changes: Information about who was assigned to work on the issue during its lifetime.
• Sprint history: A comprehensive log documenting sprint-related tasks’ changes complete with timestamps.

Custom reporting with Issue History for Jira

Issue History for Jira is like a Lego constructor, it allows you to build reports by adding blocks, which are equal to issue fields in our case. 

How to build a report?

There are 4 main steps:

1. Sort issues to see the necessary updates. You can select Project, Sprint, Assignee, JQL, or other available options. 
2. Try the “Updated by” option to see what specific user has changed.
3. Specify the time frames.
4. Use Column Manager to add any standard or custom Jira field to your report.

🔵 Status + Assignee + Priority changes in one report

With the add-on’s main report settings, you can add any issue fields (custom or standard) and get their complete history filtered by a specific time or other criteria if needed.

For this example, we chose status, assignee, and priority. We need to add selected fields to the table columns. It’s usually a good idea to add the summary so you can easily see what task is changed. 

Additionally, you can set dates for the report, select Updated by person, choose project, or other options. In the example below, you see the report for today's updates for status, assignee, and priority fields in the Marketing project.

The result: 

 

🔵 Comments added by a specific person last week

For this report, let’s switch to a different view where changes are presented one by one in raws. You can choose any field or review changes for all fields. We also selected the particular project, user, and dates within the last week.

The result:

 

🔵 Issues updated within the last 10 days (Gadget on Jira dashboard)

Issue History for Jira also provides a flexible gadget for creating a report on the Jira dashboard. In this example, you can see all issue changes within the last 10 days, but other filters are available to customize the report. 

The result:

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What reports do you need?

In this section, we’d like to hear from you. Fill out a form and tell us what data you find the most important when tracking issue history for your projects.

Your answers will help us a lot! Thank you!