Workflows for opening issue tracker pages

Being a tech lead means going through a lot of JIRA tickets: epics, features, stories, defects. In this post you will learn some of my productivity hacks to speed up the process of opening issue tracker pages.

Table of contents:

Browser search engine

Let's assume I want to look up ticket JIRA-1234. The usual way is to first open your issue tracker and then type the ticket number in the search field. I skip the first step by using a custom browser search engine. I only need to type jira 1234 in the browser address bar and press Enter:

Chrome

Open "Settings" → "Search engine" → "Manage search engines" (or paste chrome://settings/searchEngines into the address bar) and click the "Add" button.

• Search engine: JIRA
• Keyword: jira
• URL: https://my-jira-instance.com/browse/JIRA-%s

You'll need to replace the JIRA instance and the ticket prefix within the URL with your project-specific settings.

Firefox

Adding a custom search engine in Firefox is more difficult. But there's an alternative using regular bookmarks. Right click the bookmarks bar and select "New Bookmark...". The settings are similar to Chrome:

• Name: JIRA
• Keyword: jira
• Location: https://my-jira-instance.com/browse/JIRA-%s

Linking from VSCode

To wrap my head around all the tasks I'm involved with, I keep a daily journal markdown file, including a lot of ticket numbers. Instead of keeping the whole URL, I only write the ticket number and let VSCode create a clickable link to JIRA:

I achieve this with the linkme VSCode plugin. You need to specify a regex pattern and a target URL:

"linkme.rules": [
  {
    "pattern": "(JIRA-[0-9]+)",
    "url": "https://my-jira-instance.com/browse/\\1"
  },
]

Linking from IntelliJ IDEA

JetBrains IDEs support issue tracker links out of the box. After defining the pattern(s), issue links will appear everywhere in the version control context, e.g. in the Git log:

"Settings" → "Version Control" → "Issue Navigation"

• Issue ID: JIRA\-\d+
• Issue link: https://my-jira-instance.com/browse/$0