Check if issues are linked lore than once to another issue with a specific issues type

[Annick Zegers]

I have created some issues which has issuetype = "Feature"

A lot of other issues were linked to those "feature" issues.

Now I want to find all issues which are linked more than once to an issue with issuetype "Feature", is this possible?

[Mykenna Cepek · Accepted solution]

I have four options for you...

My first thought is to use an issue query against the "Feature" type and list the linked issues. Assuming there aren't thousands of results, you could just visually scan the results for "Features" that are linked more than once to other issues. My example below uses type "Story" just to illustrate the approach:

Add "Linked Issues" (via the "Columns" drop-down menu) to have the "Links" column appear in the results.

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Another option is to use Automation to loop through the issues of the specific type, and list just those with more than one link. You'd run this on-demand, and look in the rule's Audit Log for the resulting list of issues. Crude, but it works. Beware the limitations on Automation in the Free plan. Here's what my test rule looked like:

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Since you're on the free version, you might not like my third suggestion. There are lots of paid add-on Apps for Jira that enhance the JQL (issue query) capabilities when searching for issues. Look for one with additional features related to linked issues, and specifically counting the number of linked issues, and ideally checking the linked issue types as well. I'm doubtful about that last feature, but I'm not an expert on all the available Jira apps and their features. They're in the Marketplace, and most have a free trial period:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?product=jira&query=jql

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My last suggestion is to use the Jira API to query for the raw issue data, and write your own algorithm to scan for the criteria you have. The advantage here is that you can handle the results however you want - put them in a PDF report (with hyperlinks), dump them to a Slack channel, email them, write a CSV file, etc. The disadvantage is turning this into a small development project to use the Jira API. More on that here:

https://developer.atlassian.com/server/jira/platform/rest-apis/

Best wishes!

[Annick Zegers]

Thanks for this, I will try your solutions and let you know if this works!

[Annick Zegers]

Hi Mykenna,

I should have been more clear in my question: there are thousands of results and it goes over more than one project. 

In each project there is a feature called "R&D" and a feature called "non-R&D", what we have done is to link in each project all issues to either "R&D" feature of the "non-R&D" feature. There a thousands of issues which are linked in this way. 

I have already created a query which checks if an issue is not linked to the R&D feature as well as the non-R&D feature of the same project, but what I want to do now is to check if an issue is not linked to an R&D feature in one project and to non-R&D in another project.

This is the first query i have made:

[Mykenna Cepek]

Quick question: I'm curious why you didn't use a custom field that can be either "R&D" or "non-R&D". That would allow each issue to self-identify, and be so much easier to manage than links. It also makes query efforts like this much easier. Is there some additional benefit you have by using linking for this?

[Annick Zegers]

We use this in combination with AIO timesheets and it is easier to get reporting out of it when the issues are linked to a specific feature. We need to created special reports for tax reduction purposes.

But I was thinking I better created a dummy project with only 1 feature R&D and 1 feature non-R&D and link all issues to one of them.