Is there a way to show commits on subtasks of stories in a Jira scrum board?

Question

We are migrating from an in-house tool to Jira for managing our scrum board, and we have concerns that I have been unable to resolve by searching the Internet. But you folks are smart, right? ;-)

Our current scrum board shows the usual swim lanes across state columns (for todo, progress, review, done). Each swim lane represents a user story, and has a link to (and a snippet of) the user story description in Jira. It also has a number of 'tickets' (these would be subtasks in Jira lingo) that start in 'todo' and move across to eventually end up in 'done'.

So far, Jira can do all of this, too (although creating sub-tasks is rather a lot more work in Jira than in our in-house tool). However:

1. When we commit code, we include a ticket ID in the commit message, and thus each ticket displays a list of commits that were done to complete that particular ticket / partial story. I haven't been able to find out how to do this in Jira -- if it's possible at all. Instead, it seems one must open a sub-task to see if there are any commits on it?
2. Each commit also shows its review state, which gives us an excellent overview of how close to done a ticket really is. I haven't been able to find out how to do this in Jira -- if it's possible at all. Instead, it seems one must open the sub-task, and drill down further into Fisheye(?) in order to see the review state?

In total, our tool provides a one-screen overview of the state of each user story, ticket, commit, and review state; and it's very lightweight to pull in new stories (from Jira) and add tickets. We fear that Jira is not able to provide such a one-screen overview, forcing us to open Fisheye in order to know whether a given commit has passed review.

Is it really true that Jira must be this cumbersome?

For reference, here is what a single ticket (subtask) looks like in our system:

And if you look at the whole scrum board, it's actually quite easy to get a feel for the number of commits on individual user stories and tickets, and the ratio of pending/passed/failed code reviews:

Moccasin

You could try and modify the commit hook so that it does two operations: the first is associate the commit with the sub-task issue and the second would try and identify the parent issue and then associate the commit to that as well. This would be some fiddly JIRA API code to write though. – Ripuarian

Ugh, an answer to this question references an image that shows how poorly Jira handles commits - by attaching them to the story, and not the individual sub-task. – Moccasin

Answer 1

I agree with your fears when you say

We fear that Jira is not able to provide such a one-screen overview

In my experience (7+ years with Jira/Agile) I've not seen a such condensed view of information about a sigle user story even on a swimlane with relative cards.

Also in the Atlassian marketplace there seems to be no good plugin to solve your issue, even partially.

To make such move from your in-house tool to Jira retaining all you have there, I fear you should develop a custom Plug-in using Jira SDK to integrate with the agile boards.

It may be enough to start by developing a custom field to show what you need from a "ticket" (ie sub-issue) and trying to insert it into one of the three "slots" available for cards (I mean Rapidboard card layout configuration screen). If you wanna try, start from here.

Another option to create a new custom field would be the Adaptavist Scriptrunner plugin. It will ease the building of custom fields: your new field can be written also in Groovy rather than plain Java. I've used it to build an extended status custom field (just to give the user an immediate big picture of it) that informs him in plain english and with stylish css colors why an issue is blocked or anything else relevant, getting data from other fields or linked issues that are not immediately visible to the user. IMHO, it is very similar to your problem.

Recital

So then the next question is, to which extent can add-ons modify the scrum board's appearance? Can we recreate this using an add-on, or are we just s**t out of luck? – Moccasin

I've no experience in such extreme customization of the scrum board. The default way to customize it, is to add a custom field as I've suggested. Maybe you can alter the appearance of the cards by means of coding, but you should dive deep into SDK documentation or ask Atlassian support for this or maybe an Atlassian partner like the already mentioned Adaptavist. As I said before, I've saw no plug-in to aid the customization of the board on the Jira Marketplace. – Recital

Accepting this as the only answer, although it really is what I didn't want to hear. Thanks all the same! – Moccasin

Starting with Jira 8.1 you can have Dev info on the card, not the same info you need but it is a start. Have a look here confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftware/… – Recital