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Alex Omeyer
Alex Omeyer

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at stepsize.com

5 extensions that make Jira suck less for engineers

Let’s face it, Jira, the most popular project management tool on the planet, kinda sucks. It’s slow, complex and lacks an intuitive UI to create, view and manage issues, especially for developers.

That’s why I scoured the Jira marketplace for extensions that will change the way you work with Jira forever, here are the top 5:

1. Deep Clone

If you work across multiple projects in Jira, you’ll quickly find yourself duplicating a lot of work. Cloning and moving issues, templates, projects and even comments is either very difficult or not possible using standard Jira functionality.

Deep Clone for Jira takes all that pain away. With this tool, you’ll have the power of bulk cloning and moving operations at your fingertips — across projects too.

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2. Stepsize

Stepsize helps developers create and fix Jira issues, directly from their code editors.

It can be used for basic issue actions (creating, updating and deleting issues), but its true power and convenience comes from displaying your Jira issues in your codebase through clever annotations. When you hover or click on the annotations, a detailed view pops up with the issue author, description and linked code.

You can also link several pieces of code to one issue (even from other files!) making it 10x times easier for you and your team to create issues that will actually be fixed.

Try it out for VS Code or Jetbrains.

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3. Automation for Jira

Jira automation is usually done by writing scripts for the Jira API, which, believe it or not, is even more painful to use than the UI.

Automating Jira allows you to trigger tasks without writing custom scripts or thinking about the Jira API. It makes it possible to configure triggers, conditions and actions that can help you with anything from creating, transitioning or deleting issues to sending emails, notifications and even leaving comments.

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4. Creating GitHub branches from Jira

This addon seems simple initially, but it helps save a lot of collective developer time.

Creating branches in GitHub isn’t anything groundbreaking, but being able to create branches directly from Jira and have those branches linked and displayed in your issues makes it so much more convenient.

How many times have you searched through a repository's history for a commit relevant to a Jira issue? Now you’ll have access to that information directly within Jira. Powerful simplicity at its best.

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5. Merge Agent

Similar to Deep Clone, Merge Agent extends the standard Jira functionality in a super powerful way.

It’s not uncommon, especially if you’re working in a team, to come across duplicate issues and content. Jira has no way to merge content, so you’d need to manually transfer across data and delete anything you no longer need. With Merge Agent for Jira, it becomes a breeze to merge content in Jira.

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Do you know any other Jira hacks or extensions? Would to hear about them in the comments below!

Top comments (1)

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mungojam profile image
Mark Adamson

Is there anything nice for copying in GitHub code snippets into comments? It's so easy in GitHub issues