JIRA allows you to enter comments in several situations that aren't just commenting on an issue:

• when editing the issue
• when linking one issue to another
• in a workflow transition screen, like when resolving an issue.

These three cases are different to a normal comment on the issue that adds more information, but these comments are shown in the normal stream. The UI around comments should be improved so that edit comments are shown near the information about the edit, for example.

Given the current tabbed UI, that would mean edit comments, workflow comments and link comments appear in the Change History tab next to the change, not on the Comments tab.

As an example, consider the situation when you're linking several bugs to one bug. Perhaps they're all related. I just did this myself with about six bugs that are all related to a similar component in the system. I link each bug with the same comment:

"i believe this is a similar issue to LH-1901. not our problem, but needs confirmation from sean and by trying on a previous build."

This works fine for the linked bugs, but if I go to the "master" bug that everything is linked to, I see a long list of comments, each identical, that make no sense whatsoever because there's no context. Sure I can go to the All tab and puzzle out what all the field changes mean and see how all the comments are interleaved...

It would be soooo much more useful if all the context was on the same page. Example. Instead of:

Comment by Scott Bilas [07/13/05 09:48 PM] [ Permlink ]
i believe this is a similar issue to LH-1901. not our problem, but needs confirmation from sean and by trying on a previous build.

Comment by Scott Bilas [07/13/05 09:49 PM] [ Permlink ]
i believe this is a similar issue to LH-1901. not our problem, but needs confirmation from sean and by trying on a previous build.

....

we would have this:

Linked to LH-1774 as Related by Scott Bilas [07/13/05 09:48 PM] [ Permlink ]
i believe this is a similar issue to LH-1901. not our problem, but needs confirmation from sean and by trying on a previous build.

Linked to LH-1971 as Related by Scott Bilas [07/13/05 09:49 PM] [ Permlink ]
i believe this is a similar issue to LH-1901. not our problem, but needs confirmation from sean and by trying on a previous build.