Cloning an entire issue hierarchy

[Pete Singleton]

We are using Portfolio for Jira to define a project hierarchy (based on SAFe) as 

Portfolio Epic  -> Capability -> Epic -> Story -> Sub-task

Many of our projects are defining a hierarchy of issues which they then want to be able to reuse, by cloning the entire hierarchy.  So for example, cloning the Capability and all it's child Epics, Stories and Sub-tasks.  The new issues would need to be linked the relevant cloned parent.

Does anyone know any add-ons that might do this?  I have experimented doing this using Structure but unfortunately it doesn't link the Epic/Story to the newly cloned parent.

Running Jira 8.2.3, Server.

Thanks,

[Inactive Stephen]

Hi @Pete Singleton

I've not seen this one in action for your specific need but know of Bulk Clone Professional / Bulk Clone Basic - this allows you to bulk clone from a selection / filter to another project.

Have you considered other options such as templating or scripting? Some other apps I've seen teams create a template of issues from are:

• Issue Templates in Jira
• ScriptRunner
• Automation for Jira

Ste

[Pete Singleton]

Hi Ste, thanks for your reply.

I was thinking I could be able to do something with ScriptRunner, but I'm not sure if that would allow standard users to be able to do this - would they have to go to the script console and run a script?

Not sure about Automation, we have Automation Lite and that certainly doesn't seem to be able to do it.

I'm planning on giving Issue Templates a try in our test environment.

[Inactive Stephen]

Hi @Pete Singleton

You could look into whether a listener is possible to add via ScriptRunner - so if a Portfolio Epic has a specific component (eg. Template), it activates and creates a set of issues below it. 

Looking around I also found this answer here, which talks about creating issues in a similar manner using the app Power Scripts.

[Benjamin Peikes]

We use ScriptRunner for templates. We add a label "template" for all of our templates, and then have a transition "Clone Template" that is available from all statuses but does not change the status. It has a post function that calls ScriptRunner. The only thing that is a pain, is that you can't collect variables that can be used to replace strings in the template.

To get around this, we add fields, and what happens is that you fill out the fields, which updates the fields in the template, then the post function uses them during the clone, and then unsets the fields in the template ticket.