What's a good "template" solution for creating many Jira issues within a project?

[Mark Montminy]

Many of my users deal with lots of repetitive tasks and we're looking for good solutions to populating possibly hundreds of related issues at once, with some flexibility such as variables.

There are many solutions in the marketplace, but most of the ones I'm finding, are either geared towards templating field values when creating an issue, or templating the creation of an epic, or a whole project.

As one PM said, he wants an ala-cart style menu, I need 2 of these, 1 of those, and a bunch of these...  

We're kinda doing this now with csv import. Teams have fairly complex spreadsheets they've created with issue links, and estimates, due-dates etc. They check off the issues appropriate and run some macros to generate the csv's with text replacement in things like Summary, Epic Name, dates, etc.

CSV imports come with some restrictions though such as who can do them, and what they can do with them. For instance, cascading select is limited to the first value only, and custom fields from addons are a challenge.

[Luc Filion]

Hello Mark,

Another plugin that may help you in this journey is Gaia Activity - Task Creation Automation.

It does allow you to group and manage your tasks in templates, that you can instantiate as much as you want. Also, you may use a CSV import option.

[Mark Montminy]

That's the one I'm poking at right now. I looked into it about a year ago, and could never make it do anything.

It looks like exactly what I'm looking for, and even extends into Confluence, which we could use.

I keep getting pulled away, but like last time, I can't get it to DO anything. There's not many reviews, or installs. Development is slow. I haven't reached out to the vendor yet, but I'm concerned about hitching my wagon to a dead-end.

[Luc Filion]

You should reach out for the support team. They are from the Gaia for Jira plugin which has more traction. They will assist you in configuring it properly, this is closely tied with the project's configuration - they have great support and it's probably something you missed. 

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello Mark, 

Using only JIRA application, there are some options you can perform to achieve something similar to "issue templates", where you can set different pre-added field/values that you can choose when creating a new issue:

1 - Create a new issue for each template you want to have, to be used as the source to new issues. Once you need to create a new issue with that same fields, navigate to the template issue and click to Clone it:

2 - Create custom issue types for each template you would like to implement. For these issue types screens, create and add custom fields with all the information you need, where you can set the template information as Default values.

Performing these steps, every time you create an issue of that specific issue type, the default values will be automatically added to the issue fields.

To know how you can create custom issue types and configure its screens, check the documentation below:

- Configuring custom issue types

- Associating screen and issue operation mappings with an issue type

To know how you can create custom fields and configure default values, check the documentation below:

- Configuring a custom field

3 - Additionally, there's also a third-party app that you can use to configure issue templates in an easier way like you are asking for:

Issue Templates for Jira

Let me know if this information helps.

[Mark Montminy]

I'm aware of those methods. They don't really address the bigger picture of needing to create a LOT of related issues at once.

We're talking about possibly dozens of Epics, each with many Stories, some sub-tasks, dependency links between them, etc.

A basic clone doesn't handle this, and even some of the various cloning addons don't work too well for this, but I haven't tried them all.

While I haven't tried that Issue Template addon yet, it looked like it focused on the use-case of creating a single or few issues from a template. I can see that being handy as a day-to-day "I need to do X again" use-case. I'm looking for more of a "we're going to build another XYZ" with dozens of users and lots of issues involved.

[Luc Filion]

Mark, then try the Gaia Activity plugin below. You may create as many issues as you want at once.

Luc