Improved JIRA Diff

Improved JIRA Diff Icon
Display of changes in a text field.

Inspiration

We have already developed this plugin for JIRA Server. Since some users have requested this feature for JIRA Cloud as well, we set out to implement it.

What it does

Instead of using the opaque before → after display for text changes in tickets of standard Jira, you can now easily grasp differences with the help of color. All added words and sentences are marked green, while removed sections are crossed out and marked red. Also, if the change is part of a bigger block of text, it is truncated down to the immediate context.

How we built it

We build a Forge app with JavaScript and React. To determine the differences between the original and the new values of the text fields, we use https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge was to get used to the new way of developing atlassian plugins. In the course of time, other difficulties arose, such as the translation of the plugin into German. Sometimes we stopped the development to wait for updates for Forge.