What is Jira issue history? [built-in VS add-on]

Jira issue history is a diary of your everyday activities. It’s handy if you need to review what happened yesterday, the previous week/month, or any time ago. You will easily acquire data about:

• What change has been made
• Who has updated a ticket/issue
• When it has been modified

Imagine a situation when someone has changed an issue’s status, description, or due date. You can’t remember every past action, as well you can’t monitor all team members’ activities. Though this info is often required when preparing for audits. Besides, it helps to avoid business conflicts.

How to view Jira issue/ticket history

Ticket history is recorded on a single issue level in chronological order. It shows all updates a person makes, from the oldest to the most recent. Now let’s look at how to open that diary each issue has.

Steps to View History

1. Open Jira issue view panel.
2. Scroll down and find the Activity section.
3. Select the History option.

Three easy steps – and you’re there. That’s how you see the history of issue in Jira.

Issue history (built-in) VS Issue History for Jira

As you can see, it’s pretty simple to use inbuilt functionality, and you can find some basic information you may need there. For additional options, like playing with data to organize it your way, check out add-ons from the Atlassian Marketplace. 

Our SaaSJet team has developed the Issue History for Jira plugin as a journal where you can get the full issue changelog in one place. There will be no need to switch between tasks to fetch the history.

How can it help you/ When to use it?

• To get the history for the list of issues, not just a single one.
• If you need to create a Jira issue history report. Filtering options allow you to select tickets for a specific project, sprint, assignee, etc.
• To filter tickets/issues by date range. It can be a given period (today, yesterday, last week, this month, etc.) or any custom dates.
• If you delete some Jira issue unintentionally and don’t want to lose your data forever.
• To search history without JQL. For instance, when you want to find the issues updated by a particular user.

Those are the most common cases. If you need more details, check out the Issue History User Guide.

The add-on was created as a fair judge to avoid misunderstandings or conflicts between team members. For example, manager is looking for some task completed two weeks ago. He can’t find it because one of the employees has updated the summary of the issue. It was called “Present weekly report”, now it is “Prepare a presentation”. Issue History fixes those changes. You can search a task by sprint, assignee, or project it belongs to, or by date if you know it approximately.

To make it more visually appealing, let’s compare standard functionality and Issue History for Jira in a table.

Ready for the bonus part? If you’re asking yourself: How do I extract a ticket history from Jira to Excel or CSV? – keep reading.

How to export issue history

Managers or business analytics often need more insights when preparing reports. Jira doesn’t include a history export feature by default. Using REST API can be a workaround, but you can extract history only for one ticket/issue at a time.

If you want to export a story from Jira in a simple way with a one-button click, check out how you can do it with Issue History for Jira. 

Further analysis of the exported data is available with tools like Excel, Google Spreadsheets, or some other analytical systems like PowerBI.

Takeaway

Jira ticket/issue history is kind of time machine. You can look back and review the daily activity per member. 

• Built-in history is a good option for basic needs if you’re interested in a single issue.
• Issue History app will help to organize the report with historical changes for any list of issues you need + export for further analysis.

Here you will find 30-days free trial if you need to test how the add-on works for your case.