The Ultimate Guide to Issue Templates in Jira (Description Templates)

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Do you often find user stories in your Jira project with incomplete information? Are bug reports missing crucial steps to reproduce them?

If you're facing these challenges, you're not alone. Many teams struggle with inconsistent issue reporting, leading to confusion, delays, and inefficient workflows. Fortunately, Jira offers several powerful solutions to address these problems using issue templates. In this guide, we'll explore three effective ways to implement issue description templates in Jira, which will help you to streamline the issue creation process and make your team more efficient.

3-ways to set up issue templates in Jira

1. Set default description text (⚠️ team-managed projects only)

If you are using team-managed project, you are in for a treat.

Before that, how do I know if I am using team-managed project? It's simple: at the bottom of the left sidebar for each project, there's text indicating the project type.

Steps to set up default description:

• On team managed projects, go to Project Settings → Issue Types
• Select an Issue Type and expand the description field (▶️)
• Now you can enter a default description in the field. Save it and done ✅

Downsides

This can work for smaller teams without complex requirements. But it has a number of limitations.

1. As stated, this only works in team-managed project which has tons of limitations
2. Difficult to find and manage templates since there is no one central place to access them.
3. Cannot share templates across Projects and Issue Types. This can be very cumbersome to update each time you want to change something.

2. Use Jira Automation to apply templates

Another way to use description templates is via Automation. This one requires some knowledge of Automation in Jira. Also, since Automation is quite flexible, you could use different triggers and conditions than the one shown below.

Steps to apply templates:

• Go to Project Settings → Automation → Create rule
• Select a trigger → Issue created
• Add a condition → {{issue.description.length}} is less than 50
• Add an action → Edit issue → Choose fields → Description

After this rule is turned on, every time a new issue is created, but description text is short (50 chars in our example), a template will be applied. Again, Automation is quite flexible, so you can modify it to suit your needs.

Downsides

While this approach can work in some cases, it is generally not recommended. Let's look at some critical issues with this approach.

1. Templates will be only applied after an issue is created, which is generally not what is needed. It also can overwrite valuable information written by user with standard template text.
2. It requires knowledge of Jira Automation rules
3. If you are not on Premium plan, you could easily hit Automation limits

3. Use an app: Issue Templates Pro

The final approach is by using Marketplace apps, especially our app Issue Templates Pro for Jira was built to solve this problem. We believe this app overcomes all the limitations discussed in above two methods.

Advantages

• Supports team-managed as well as company-managed projects
• Templates can be shared across projects and issue types
• One central place to find, update and manage templates
• Support for Jira Automation as well as issues created via APIs or other apps like Xray
• Built using Atlassian Forge, data stored 100% within Atlassian Cloud

Steps to install and set-up templates

1. Install the app (30-day free trial) from Marketplace listing (you can ask your Jira admin if you do not have permission to install)
2. Once installed, go to Top Nav → Apps → Issue Templates
3. Follow the in-depth guide in our documentation

Downsides

• Needs admin approval. This can take some time, especially if you work in a large organization.
• Extra cost for the app

Summary

Jira has multiple ways to streamline the issue creation process to make your team more efficient. While the first approach can work on smaller teams using simple team-managed projects, we recommend using Marketplace app for most other teams.

Ready to give it a try?

• Start 30-day FREE trial
• Checkout the detailed how-to guide

[Khalid _Jaanga_]

This App is perfect for what it does, many other templating apps feel bloated and make you pay for features you will never use, with one you feel like a surgeon.

Thanks a lot