Jira Issues: Find the Changed Description and Roll It Back

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Hello community members! If you like to know how to search for issues with changed descriptions and revert those changes, check out this use case from my SaaSJet team. It happens sometimes that one of your teammates makes some updates, but you need it the way it was before. It even can be caused by the Jira automation sometimes. Here we will show how to find the changed description and how to revert changes with the help of Issue History for Jira.

How to search for changed descriptions in Jira?

When you make any updates to Jira tasks, it’s always recorded in history, but you can’t search by the past meanings. However, the history can show the previous and current value. If you know what words the description consists of now, you can find it with JQL. For example, you look for the task with the word “checklist” in it.

description ~ checklist

You can also add other conditions to this JQL like project or assigne.

Project = Development And description ~ checklist

You can learn more here: Use advanced search with Jira Query Language (JQL)

If you don’t know how and which descriptions were changed, you can quickly define them using Issue History for Jira. The add-on provides changes for all issues in well-structured order.

How to revert changes made to the description?

Issue history keeps changes made to any field, including description. The problem is that formatting is lost, so copy and paste doesn’t work well here. If you want to revert changes you or someone else made, it’s possible with Issue History for Jira. One-button click and you will get description before updates.

Let’s look at the complete guide to find and revert the changed description.

1. Select issues by JQL and type in the word you need, here we use “checklist”.

2. Add the description field to the grid columns.

3. Click Revert and check the changes you are about to roll back. Confirm your decision and you will get back the previous version of description.

It especially helps if you need to revert changes for the list of issues, that way you can save your time. 

*All the formatting such as tables, boldness, colors will be saved. The only exception is attachment, we can only restore its name because Jira deletes it. 

Hope this short use case will be helpful for you. 

Try to revert changes made to the description