Intro
When updating a release note that includes long lists of tickets (in my case, hundreds of bug fixes), going through the list can be problematic to keep the list up to date due to numerous factors that influences the ticket's timeline and release date. One trick I figured out was to use Excel to show me what has changed.How this works
- Copy and paste the list of tickets into Excel (column A for example) from your ongoing or pre-lease document. It might be best to remove any formatting features in the list to ensure content consistency.
- Go to your source of JIRA tickets and collect the list of tickets and copy it.
- Back in Excel, paste the new list into column B in the same Excel document. Again, make sure any formatting has been stripped from this list as well.
- Select both columns and set Conditional Formatting with Highlight Cell Rules set to Duplicate Values.
- Since the tickets highlighted are good to go, I like to format with green file with dark green text.
Any ticket that isn't highlighted in column B after setting this should stand out pretty well. These unhighlighted tickets will be the new tickets you need to add to your pre-release document. Any tickets that aren't highlighted in column A could mean that the ticket was removed.
Regardless of which tickets aren't highlighted in either column, you should still review the JIRA ticket to confirm it was added or removed.
Tip: You can quickly tell if tickets have been added and/or removed by selecting all tickets in each individual column and looking at the cell count. If the count is off, then some tickets have been added and/or removed. This system isn't perfect because sometimes a ticket can be removed and another ticket added thus keeping the ticket count the same. However, the highlighting will pick up these changes and show you.
Is this a perfect system? No. Does it do 80% of the work for me between ticket updates? Yes.
Can this be done using Google Sheets? Yes, but it isn't as easy to do in Excel nor is it reliable.
I would appreciate any feedback and/or thoughts on how they manage ticket lists.
