Is it reasonable and useful to have devs store a link to pull requests in a story?

David Karr January 17, 2020

I work in a very large org that uses align for its stories and bitbucket to store the code. Our product owners write the stories. They know the domain and the business very well. The implementation is somewhat a black box to them. If a new dev has to work on a story, they have to talk to other devs to translate the story in terms of the implementation.

What if devs had a field in the story where they could put a link to the pull request(s) that implemented the story? 

If this were done, the dev could ask the PO for any related stories that had been done already. The dev could look at the changes in those pull requests and have much better understanding of the mapping between domain and implementation. 

Any thoughts about whether this would be useful? Has anyone tried to do this? 

 

**Update**:

I discovered the following related thread: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/how-to-link-an-existing-branch-pull-request-to-a-jira-issue/qaq-p/421291#U1281073

At the same time, a colleague pointed out to me that we have BitBucket integrated with Jira so that if a developer puts "[jira issue id] ..." in the commit comment, then the Jira ticket will have a "Development" section that points to the commit and pull request.

The flaw with using this strategy is that it depends on the developer always putting the jira issue id in the commit.  We have a comment verification process that does very limited validation, and it doesn't require the comment has a jira ticket id in it. Many commits don't need that.  A related flaw is that this process requires that the developer not misspell the ticket id.

This could be mitigated if the "Development" section of the Jira ticket could be edited, but that doesn't appear to be allowed. I would have liked the ability to add references to additional pull requests.

 

1 answer

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David Karr January 23, 2020

One of my team members pointed out that if our commits to BitBucket have the story id in brackets, there is some integration that connects the associated commit and pull request into the "Development" section of the JIRA issue.  This is good if the developer remembers to do this when they create the commit.

It's unfortunate that the "Development" section of the issue in JIRA is not editable. It should be possible to connect the issue to additional pull requests even if the commits didn't have the issue id in the commit.

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