This is somewhat related to JRA-2581. This is our most pressing problem regarding JIRA right now. We have a number of projects which depend on a rather large set of common libraries. When issues are reported they are reported against a given product even though the bug may be down in the common libraries affecting a number of products. Many times it is not obvious if the issue is at the application level or down in the common library when it is first reported, but the issues are always reported against the product, not the libaries. What we need is a way to easily report the same issue against multiple projects and to track them separate if need be, but also to apply changes to this issue across all the projects it is reported against.

Basically, I'd like to see a feature that allows me to clone an issue to multiple projects and versions in one step. This would be available at the Create, Edit , or Resolve issue stage. Once an issue was cloned then anytime a change was made, other than to the Version or Component, it could be applied to zero or more of the linked (of type clone) issues. This would give us the ability track issues separately if need be or to report them against multiple products and resolve them in multiple projects (for tracking purposes) easily without having to clone/move-clone/move-clone/move for each project.

Perhaps a UI where I could check a box saying to 'Apply to multiple projects' and then Add Project/Versions to a list. If it was a new issue it would automatically create the clones and move them to the specified projects and if it was an existing issue you could select which project to apply changes to and/or add/delete projects from the list.

We've tried to use the Cloning feature currently available to address this issue, but we're finding it is just to cumbersome to create, clone/move, clone/move, clone/move, etc to be practical. Also, if you apply a change to one issue such as a comment, this is not propogated to the other cloned issues. You can still get to it via the links, but it is easy for people to miss relevant information if they don't review the linked issues.