How to recover edits when multiple users editing a story at the same time

[krista carpenter]

In Jira, If two users edit story at same time, the first to save will lose edits when second saves.  Is there a way to recover the first edits or is there a way to work consecutively on a story and save both edits?

[Bojana]

New bug report on this topic https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-11039

In our case due to "concurrent editing" where two users have been doing the "issue move" simultaneously it resulted in corrupted wf, where transitions were not available after move was done.

[Alexey Matveev]

Hello,

I guess Jira works consecutively, Jira saves the second save in your case. You can see changes in the History tab of the Activity section in an issue.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Alexey is correct. 

It's not losing anything.  User 1 commits a change, then later, user 2 commits one.  There's nothing lost.  User 1's changes are in the history.

[krista carpenter]

Thank you for the explanation.

[Daniel Frey]

Same if two or more people update the ticket description at the same time, only the changes of the person who hit the save button last are saved.

Other changes may be in a history log somewhere that nobody reads, but that means those changes are essential lost for other readers of the ticket.

We've run into this issue so man times... people keep their tickets open in their browser while they work on it, get new information, update the ticket description to have the most important things in one place without having to read through a thousand comments and by doing that deleting other users updates. Almost 3 years later now,  still has not been fixed...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The "fix" for this is to educate your people about how data works.

>people keep their tickets open in their browser while they work on it

This is not the problem itself.  The problem is the arrogance of people thinking that because they start to edit something they become the owner, the only person who matters. 

Stop them.

Tell everyone that they need to say what they want to say when they should. 

Update your issues when you have something useful to say.  Don't open them and pretend you're doing something when you're not.

(Yes, I'm grumpy about this, but it's a bad pattern of behaviour I see a lot.  My only advice on it is "stop trying to blame the tools for your human's bad behaviour")

[Daniel Frey]

It's quite the opposite. No one is arrogant, all they want to do is to work together and not accidentally delete updates others make at the same time.

There's no warning that another user is currently editing the ticket description as well or that it has changed since the browser window was opened or even since they started editing the description, or a merge view, or a lock so others cannot edit the issue at the same time. Nothing. People have no way of knowing whether they are overwriting other people's changes or not.

So I don't agree, it's not the people's fault, it's the system and there's nothing to educate people on, other than that the system is flawed and that they need to hit "F5" if the ticket has been open in the browser for a while to get the latest updates before they start making changes because the system has no sync or locking mechanisms whatsoever. And even then they will have to double check the result because they may still overwrite other people's changes that were made at the same time.

It's a system that people use to collaborate. Yet, the system does not consider that and I don't see how people can avoid that if they don't know about it or blaming users rather than implementing one the of the many solutions helps ...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There is an arrogance in assuming that because you are editing something, your edit is more important than what someone else is doing. 

There is nothing wrong with the system, it's tracking changes to issues.  If your humans don't get that, it's not the systems fault, it's their not understanding.

[Daniel Frey]

By your own definition, the system is the arrogant part here. User's think their comment is AS important as other people's comments which is exactly why nothing should get lost. It's the system that obviously acts like "whoever hits the save button last, is the most important user and therefore I overwrite all changes others have made while this user edited the ticket". That's the arrogant part here.

Anyway. This doesn't lead anywhere. I've made my point clear. I think the system should handle that and have suggested multiple solutions. Systems should adapt and support humans, not the other way around. The goal is to increase productivity. This is not the case if someone has a stressful day and needs to double check everything 3 times because the system has this major shortcoming.

Your point of view is, that this is totally ok, and humans need to adapt to computers and that there is no reason for the system to at least warn the user that he's deleting other people's changes.

[Deleted user]

Our users are trying to log customer names and case numbers when there's a major bug report, so they are taking calls and updating the customer list while clobbering the changes made seconds ago by the previous editor.  Unfortunately we don't have a great way to add to the list of customers on the bug without editing the field where we list them.  It's unfortunate there isn't a warning or an option to do a merge or evaluation at the point of saving when changes have happened since the user started editing.