Issue Transitions: setup and use

Issue Transitions are a convenience feature that automates the transition of Jira issues from “Open” to “In Progress” to “Resolved.” The features is available to all Elite subscribers that are connected to Jira.


Control of Issue Transitions happens on the Issue Tracker Connections page. From there, you can choose three settings for control of Issue Transitions:

Transition issues for GitClear users. When chosen, we will transition issues to “In Progress” and “Resolved” only when commits are made by developers who have accepted an invite to sign up for GitClear

Transition issues for all committers. Any time that we can deduce the connection between a committer in your project and a user in Jira, we will transition issues referenced by commits made by that developer. This option can be confusing for developers since it will have the effects listed below, without them being able to explain what mechanism is making the changes.

Do not interpret commits. Disable Issue Transitions.



The options provided within Issue Tracker Connections to configure Issue Transitions

linkWhat do Issue Transitions do?

As of their initial launch in Q4 2021, Issue Transitions take place in two situations:

Marking an item “In Progress.” If your Jira project has a status that indicates an issue is “underway,” then we will transition issues to that status if a developer References an Issue Tracker Project issue. We will also assign the issue to the developer that did the work.

Marking an item “Resolved.” If we can detect an issue status that contains words like “Fixed” or “Resolved,” then we will transition issues into that status if a developer mentions fixing the issue. For example, if their commit message says “Here I fixed ABC-123” or “Resolves ABC-123,” then the “ABC-123” issue will be transitioned to “Resolved” status and the ticket will be assigned to the user who made the commit. We will also add a comment to the ticket explaining that it was transitioned via the GitClear bot, so there is not ambiguity regarding how the issue status got changed.

For Issue Transitions to work, we must be able to unambiguously determine which committer on your team corresponds to which user in your Jira instance. See the next session for details on how we make that derivation, and how you can override the default developer/user mappings detected by heuristics.


Note that, when issues are transitioned, if the developer who invoked the transition has not created their own Jira integration token (by logging in on the Issue Tracker connect page) then Jira will ascribe the changed ticket status to the user who has been designated to use for transitions (see "Designating which connection to use for transitions," below).


linkDesignating connection between Developer and Jira user

We primarily rely upon a series of heuristics to associate each developer on the team to a Jira user. Without getting too deep into our proprietary tactics, we seek to identify a uniquely well-fit match between the developer’s name and the Jira user’s name.


Sometimes it’s not possible for GitClear to automatically detect the user identity for a particular committer. In these cases, you can visit the Issue Tracker Connect settings and choose “Advanced Settings” under the “Issue Transitions heading:


A list of known users for the Jira integration is provided so that an admin can map committers to Jira users, in the cases where it can not be detected automatically

This will offer you a full list of active committers, where you (or the user themselves, if they have admin access) can pick which Jira user they are connected with using a ds


linkDesignating which connection to use for transitions

When GitClear calls Jira’s API to transition an issue to “In Progress” or “Resolved,” Jira will associate the API call with an existing user in their system. You can choose this user to be anyone from the team who has logged in to your Jira project. By default, if we can determine that the developer making a commit has logged into Jira, we will make the transition using that Jira token. However, if the developer has not logged in (e.g., because they don’t have access to project settings), then the default token will be used.


A list of all users who have created a Jira token will be listed as candidates to serve as the default assigner for Issue Transitions


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