How to follow duplicate issues in Jira?

[#1]

Many Jira users, especially those whose work is connected to Service Desk, have the same problem – a huge amount of duplicate issues. It’s a common thing when a client always has the same issue all over again as an unstable connection for example. And it causes a number of issues with the same parameters.

So, is it possible to follow all these duplicate issues?

You may know that Jira has an excellent tool as Automation. It lets you automate your everyday actions and workflows by creating rules to handle required scenarios.

In Automation Cloud Library there is the Close duplicate issues rule, but if you look inside the rule you’ll see that the rule just closes an issue that is linked as Duplicate. It does not show the process of duplicate issues search.

Let’s think about how we can find the duplicate issues using Jira tools.

We can use a JQL query and set the parameters we need to find duplicates like in the example:

The problem is we don’t know the parameters we need because the new duplicate issue does not exist yet.

It can be handled with smart values (you can read about them here).

The smart values help us with Automation settings when we want to find duplicate issues using JQL. We can find matches in fields among issues even without knowing the values.

Set up example

Let’s take the case when we need to check for duplicates every new issue with the full match by Problem and Client fields (a client has a repetitive issue).

In case of duplicating, Jira links all the discovered issues to the new one with the link type Duplicate.

It’s easier to search by fields with values to be selected from a list. In this case, we can avoid not accurate spelling problem.

Pick trigger

Determine when the rule starts. In our example, the trigger is a new issue creating. 

Narrow the scope of your rule

New component → Branch rule/related issues

Here we determine conditions for launching a rule.

In our case, we use the JQL with the smart values for the search.

When we set the values for the fields we use this syntaxis:

{{triggerissue.customfield_10034}}

That can be read as "the value of the field with id 10034 from an issue that was the trigger for this rule".

Pay attention that the syntaxis depends on the field type. Here we use the text field syntaxis.

If you have another field type, please, verify the syntaxis by this link.

The search through all issues takes time.

To cut the time you can narrow the scope even more. In our case, we check the matches only for issues that were created within the last 3 days.

Ad action

New Action → Link issues

In the example we want the discovered duplicate issues to be automatically linked to the new ones.

We use Link issues action and when we choose the link type we have in mind that this action is for “old” issues so those discovered issues should be marked as is duplicated by.

It was one of the ways how to make your workflow easier using Jira Automation.

[Marc Isikoff]

Help if using Jira Cloud of Service Management, but alas, so many Fortune 50 companies are doing their own cloud and their Jira Projects are in their cloud, not Atlassians. Huge miss for Atlassian as a company to think they will get Jira Cloud customers out of Fortune 50. We need better support for Server versions because we are not in using this in data centers, we are in the cloud (just not yours).