Similar Issues Plugin Manual

Similar Issues Finder Plugin targets to minimize number of duplicate issues within JIRA. Each duplicate issue takes precious time of its reporter, assignee, management and QA teams without any significant benefit to the end product. For a 500 employee organization saving 1 minute of each person a day will save nearly 3 months each year. Even a single duplicate issue may easily cause an hours work.

Similar Issues Plugin

Similar Issues Overlay

Similar Issues Plugin performs a real-time background search on the JIRA to find out similar issues as soon as you start to write summary field of an issue. Found similar/duplicate issues are displayed below the summary field. It also highlights matching terms within the result list so that it is easier to see why two issues are similar. Similarity search is also performed in the summary and description of issues. Best matches are displayed on the top. In addition to summary of the issue, issue type and issue key are also displayed. If issue is resolved it's key is displayed with strikethrough style.

Similar Issues Overlay

As you can see from the above screenshot, issue keys are a link to actual issues and you can open them directly in the new browser tab.

Similar Issues Tab

While working on an existing issue, we sometimes need quick access to similar issues and Similar Issues Plugin could also be a help here. Plugin adds a "Similar Issues" tab to issue's tab list and when you click on it, issues similar to currently viewed issues are displayed. Similar issues list is not loaded until you open the relevant tab, so plugin does not cause any delay in loading the page.

Similar Issues Tab

Similar Issues Settings

Actually this plugin is an 'install and forget' type of plugin; you can start using it immediately after its installation without a single configuration. But if you need to tweak how the plugin works and how overlays are displayed, you can access plugin's setting panel from plugin administration menu of JIRA.

Plugin Settings

Configuration Option Description
Similarity Mode There are two alternatives. Loose and Strict. Strict mode requires all search terms to exist in similar issues, so it returns much less result than Loose mode. Loose performs more loose similarity check. Loose mode is set as default.
Theme Currently there are two alternatives, light and dark. Light is the default and matches the color schema of JIRA. Similar results overlay takes more attention with the dark mode due to the contrast with JIRA's look and feel. Light mode is set as default.
Display Mode There are two modes, overlay and inline. In overlay mode similar issues are displayed in a popup just below the summary field but on top of following fields. In inline mode, similar issues are displayed between summary and fields following it. All fields are pushed down to show similar issue list. When you finish editing summary fields similar issue list is hidden in both mode. Overlay mode is set as default.
Number of Issues to Display Default value is 5. This value could be between 3 and 10. It shows how many issues will be listed in the similar issues list.

If you have any problem while using the plugin, you can always enter a support request on http://jira.denizoguz.com/browse/SIFJ or contact me on Atlassian Answers.

You can also download this manual as PDF.