Jira issue dependency grapher

Ever had issues with not knowing which Jira issues should be done after which? I solved that.

More information

Project management software like Jira allows you to add "has to be done before" and "has to be done after" links to issues, so that you know which need to be done after which. But what are you supposed to do, when you have a sprint that has like 20-40 issues in it, all of which can have those links and amongst multiple different ones?

What I did

I created a graph traversal script with Python, which connects to Jira, pulls the issues that correspond to a particular JQL (Jira Query Language) query, then calculates all of the dependencies and finally draws them in a graph that's easy to understand. Not only that, but I wrote logic for circular dependency checking, to illustrate when some of the ordering doesn't necessarily make too much sense.

What I learnt

Once again, it felt like Python had come to my rescue, in helping me achieve notable results with limited amounts of effort. Personally, I think that the Jira API could be a little bit easier to work with as well, but overall this worked out nicely. Now, getting people to actually use the links between issues, that's another story entirely.

Sometimes it's easier for them to shrug and claim that they'll just start working with whatever feels like it makes the most sense, even if they're wrong, instead of doing a bit extra work.