Jira Align causes the History Log of a Jira Story to record a change of Summary when there is no apparent change

Summary

Making a change to the Program Increment (PI) of Feature in Jira Align (JA) updates the Summary of one or more child stories even though the text itself does not change.

In Jira, the story shows an entry in the History Log indicating that the Summary changed, even though it hasn't. As an example, the change might appear to be from 'abcdef' to 'abcdef'

However, in Jira Align, there is no entry in the Story Audit Log indicating that the Title was changed. However, there is an entry indicating that the PI was changed for the parent Feature.

Environment

Jira Align

Diagnosis

The Jira History log will show a change in the summary but as per the below example image, the Summary field is apparently being updated to the same value.

Cause

The Jira Summary has a trailing space, which the Jira Connector removes when it is synchronized into Jira Align.

Any subsequent change to the same story in Jira Align, including if the parent Feature is assigned to a different PI, will trigger the connector to update the story in Jira and this then removes the trailing space in Jira and causes the confusing entry in the Jira History Log

More detailed explanation

In Jira Align (JA), we can assign a Feature to a new PI and such a change updates the background Feature Program Increment attribute of all child stories of the feature.

This change is treated in the same way as if a direct update has been made to the affected story and triggers the Jira Connector to sync the story and push across any changes made in JA even though there was no visible change made to the story in JA itself.

As Jira does not contain a PI field in stories, no History Log entry is created for the Feature PI change itself, however, the removal of the trailing space does cause an entry in the log for the Summary being changed

In this particular scenario, it can be confusing because:

Jira → JA sync removes the trailing space when writing the Summary into JA but this doesn’t sync back to Jira UNLESS another change is made.

The PI change initiates the sync JA → Jira but doesn’t create a Jira History log entry for the PI

So, it appears that the PI (Release) change in the parent JA Feature created a Jira History log entry for the child Jira Story Summary field. Because the change removes a trailing space, the log entry appears to show identical characters.

Solution

This is by design. The Jira Connector is designed to clean up trailing spaces on the fields.

While not specifically a problem if email notifications are setup for changes in Jira, then alerts may be sent.