Lisa Jira Write Ticket

Write JIRA Ticket: $ARGUMENTS

All Atlassian operations in this skill go through lisa-atlassian-access. Do not call MCP tools or acli directly.

Create or update a JIRA ticket with all required relationships, metadata, and quality gates. Every section below is mandatory. Thin tickets are rejected.

Repository name for scoped comments: basename $(git rev-parse --show-toplevel).

Writing by another path? The gates still apply

A team that talks to its tracker through its own script is doing a normal thing — the script usually owns the credential plumbing, and Lisa neither controls nor wants to control it. What that script does NOT get is either half of this skill's quality gate, and nothing about the write says so.

A read-back is not the missing check. A bespoke path almost always re-reads the ticket after writing and confirms the tracker stored what was sent. That is worth doing and it is not this. It proves TRANSPORT: the API accepted the payload and the field values round-tripped. It cannot fail for the reason these gates exist, because it never looks at whether what was sent was any good — a ticket with no acceptance criteria, no parent, and a human decision left sitting in the middle of it round-trips perfectly. That is the dangerous half of the shape: a failing control gets investigated, a misread one gets trusted.

So a write by any other path still owes both phases, and both run standalone against an item that already exists:

Skill(lisa-jira-validate-ticket) with the draft ticket, or with a reference to a live one
Skill(lisa-jira-verify) with PROJ-1234

These are plugin-resident skills invoked through the Skill tool. They are not shell scripts and will not appear in any repository's scripts/ directory, including yours. An agent that searches the repo it is standing in, finds nothing, and concludes the capability is absent has made the one mistake that turns a local script from the convenient option into the only one.

Phase 1 — Resolve Intent

Determine from $ARGUMENTS and context whether this is a CREATE or UPDATE:

• CREATE: no existing ticket key provided
• UPDATE: ticket key provided — call /jira-read-ticket <KEY> first to load the full current state before editing. Never overwrite without reading.

Resolve the active Atlassian site via lisa-atlassian-access operation: list-sites (the access skill enforces connection match against .lisa.config.json).

Phase 2 — Gather Required Inputs

Required fields (stop and ask if missing — do not invent values):

Optional but recommended: assignee, components, fix versions, labels, sprint, story points, reporter.

Issue-type validity and required custom fields are enforced by lisa-jira-validate-ticket's F1 / F4 gates (which run via lisa-atlassian-access under the hood). If you need to inspect the metadata directly, request a new operation in atlassian-access rather than calling MCP / acli yourself.

Phase 3 — Description Quality

The description MUST address three audiences. Reject and rewrite if any are missing.

h2. Source Requirement
[Required whenever the ticket originates from a PRD (the caller passes
 `prd_source`). Answers "why was this done?" — cite the PRD and quote the
 requirement(s) VERBATIM, never paraphrased:
 - **PRD**: <PRD title + link> §"<section heading>"
 - **Requirement (R3)**: "<verbatim requirement text from the PRD>"
 One Requirement line per satisfied requirement. Derived / cross-cutting
 work that traces to no single requirement uses the supporting form:
 "Derived work supporting R3, R7 — no single PRD section." Close with:
 "This ticket exists to satisfy the quoted requirement. If implementation
 scope drifts from the quoted text, the PRD is the authority — raise the
 conflict rather than silently reinterpreting it." Omit the section only
 for ad-hoc tickets with no PRD lineage.]

h2. Context / Business Value
[Why this matters. Stakeholder-facing. Concrete user impact or business outcome.
 Link to the originating Slack thread, Notion doc, incident, or customer report.]

h2. Technical Approach
[Developer-facing. Integration points, impacted modules, data model implications,
 relevant tradeoffs. Not a full design doc — a pointer for someone picking it up.]

h2. Acceptance Criteria
# Given <precondition>
  When <action>
  Then <observable outcome>
# Given <precondition>
  When <action>
  Then <observable outcome>

h2. Out of Scope
[Explicit list of what this ticket does NOT cover. Forces scope discipline.]

h2. Target Backend Environment
[ALWAYS required on a leaf — the SECTION is unconditional, only its
 VALUE is conditional. It is where `runtime_behavior_change` is
 persisted, so omitting it records nothing rather than recording "no".
 When the ticket changes runtime behavior, use an exact
 `deploy.branches` key. A human-confirmed value is a bare key or
 `Confirmed: <env>`. An automated evidence write is
 `Inferred: <env> — evidence: <title|body|reproduction|hostname>`; an automated
 generic default is `Assumption: <env> — remote default branch <branch>`.
 Without a unique reverse-map use `Assumption: remote default branch <branch>`.
 Human confirmation replaces the automated annotation with a bare key or
 `Confirmed: <env>`. ALWAYS render this section — it is where
 `runtime_behavior_change` is persisted, and an absent section reads as
 *underivable*, not exempt. Work that changes no runtime behavior declares the
 exemption in place of an environment: `None — no runtime behavior change:
 doc-only` (or `config-only` / `type-only`). An Epic/container declares
 `None — container: state rolls up from children`. Visible prose, not an HTML
 comment, for the same reason the Branch Plan provenance line is: JIRA's ADF has
 no comment node. See the `derived-branch-plan` rule.]

h2. Branch Plan
[GENERATED, never hand-authored. Render only when the ticket has a Target
 Backend Environment; omit entirely when `runtime_behavior_change = false`
 (doc-only / config-only / type-only) or for an Epic/container — absence is
 correct there. Derive per the `derived-branch-plan` rule: resolve the
 environment, map it forward through `.lisa.config.json` `deploy.branches`,
 and prove the branch exists on the remote. Do not accept caller-supplied
 branches; recompute them. Exactly three lines:
   Branch from: <branch>
   PR into: <branch>
   Derived from: Target Backend Environment <env> via .lisa.config.json deploy.branches
 Both fields name the same branch by construction. A missing, ambiguous, or
 non-unique mapping, or a branch absent from the remote, STOPS the write —
 never default to `main` or the remote default to keep the write alive.]

h2. Sign-in Required
[Include this section ONLY if the work touches authenticated surfaces.
 Specify: the account/role to sign in as, where to get the credentials
 (1Password item name, env var, seeded fixture), and any MFA/SSO notes.
 Omit the section entirely when sign-in is not required — its absence
 means "no sign-in needed for this ticket."]

h2. Repository
[Required for Bug / Task / Sub-task / Improvement. Name the single repo this ticket covers.
If the work spans repos, this ticket type is wrong — split into per-repo
Tasks/Subtasks under a parent Story or Epic. Epic / Spike / Story may
list multiple repos.]

h2. Validation Journey
[Delegate to /jira-add-journey if the ticket changes runtime behavior.
 Skip only for doc-only, config-only, or type-only tickets. Cross-work-item
 evidence pointers use `[EVIDENCE-REF: <work-item-ref> | <artifact-type>: <kebab-case-name>]`;
 they never replace this ticket's local S14 marker.]

Rules:

• PRD-sourced tickets (caller passed prd_source) MUST carry the Source Requirement section with verbatim quotes — paraphrases are rejected (validator gate S16). This applies at every level, sub-tasks included: a leaf claimed in isolation must explain its own "why".
• Every acceptance criterion uses Given/When/Then. No vague "should work" language.
• Every criterion is independently verifiable (UI, API, data, or performance check).
• If the ticket is a Bug, include reproduction steps, expected vs. actual behavior, and environment.
• If the ticket is a Spike, include the question being answered and the definition of done (decision doc, prototype, or findings).
• If sign-in is required, the implementer must be able to sign in from the description alone — never assume they will guess the account or hunt for credentials.

Phase 4 — Relationship Discovery (Mandatory)

Before creating or updating, find candidate relationships. Do NOT skip — this is the step agents most often omit.

4a. Epic Parent

If the ticket is not a Bug and not an Epic, it MUST have an epic parent:

1. If explicitly provided, use it.
2. Otherwise search active epics:

   project = <PROJECT> AND issuetype = Epic AND statusCategory != Done
   

   via lisa-atlassian-access operation: search-issues jql: "<query>". Match on keywords from the summary and description.
3. If no epic matches, stop and ask the human to create or pick one. Do NOT orphan the ticket.

4b. Related Tickets

Relationship discovery is mandatory on every create and every update — never declare "no related work" without doing both searches below and recording their outcomes on the ticket.

Search 1: local git history (catches PRs/commits that touched the same area but were never linked to a ticket):

# Commits mentioning the keyword
git log --all --oneline --grep="<keyword>"

# Commits that touched the relevant paths
git log --all --oneline -- <path-or-glob>

# Recent activity in this area (last 90 days)
git log --since=90.days --oneline -- <path-or-glob>

If the git search surfaces a PR or commit that relates to this work, capture the PR URL — it becomes a remote link (Phase 4c) and may also point to a sibling ticket worth linking.

Search 2: Jira JQL (catches open and recently-closed tickets):

# Open tickets touching the same component
project = <PROJECT> AND component = "<component>" AND statusCategory != Done

# Open tickets with overlapping keywords
project = <PROJECT> AND (summary ~ "<keyword>" OR description ~ "<keyword>") AND statusCategory != Done

# Epic siblings
"Epic Link" = <EPIC-KEY>

# Recent tickets touching the same labels
project = <PROJECT> AND labels in (<labels>) AND updated >= -30d

# Recently closed tickets in the same area (catches duplicates of work just shipped)
project = <PROJECT> AND component = "<component>" AND status = Done AND updated >= -30d

Record the outcome. Add a ## Relationship Search subsection (or a comment if updating an existing ticket) listing the queries you ran and what they returned. If the searches yielded nothing, write that explicitly — "Searched git history for <keywords> and JQL for component=X, label=Y, epic siblings; no related work found." A ticket with zero links and no documented search is rejected.

For each candidate, classify the relationship:

4c. Remote Links

Identify and attach:

• GitHub PRs, branches, or commits related to this work
• Confluence pages (design docs, RFCs, runbooks)
• Dashboards (Grafana, Datadog, Sentry issue)
• Incident tickets (PagerDuty, Statuspage)
• Source artifacts from the originating PRD / parent epic: classify and inherit per the rules in lisa-tracker-source-artifacts (invoke that skill if you haven't loaded the rules in this session). The short version: enumerate the parent epic's remote links and inherit the ones whose domain matches this ticket's scope (UI → ui-design + ux-flow; backend → data; infra → ops; always inherit reference). Never assume a developer will walk up to the epic to find design context — attach it here.

If the ticket was generated from a PRD (by lisa-notion-to-tracker or similar) and the parent epic has no source artifacts, surface that as a smell and ask whether artifacts were missed during extraction before proceeding.

4d. Source Precedence (must appear on the ticket)

Source precedence rules and cross-axis conflict handling are defined in lisa-tracker-source-artifacts §3 and §4. When a ticket carries both design artifacts and a description, record the precedence explicitly in the ticket description (under Technical Approach or a dedicated ## Source Precedence subsection) so the implementer doesn't silently reconcile conflicts. Cross-axis conflicts go under ## Open Questions as BLOCKER items.

For UI-touching tickets, include the existing-component reuse expectation per lisa-tracker-source-artifacts §7.

4e. Live Product Walkthrough Findings (UI-touching tickets)

If the ticket modifies an existing user-facing surface, a lisa-product-walkthrough should already have been run upstream (by lisa-notion-to-tracker Phase 2b or lisa-jira-create). Inherit its findings under a ## Current Product subsection in the ticket description so the implementer sees what's shipped today before changing it. If the upstream skill skipped the walkthrough but this ticket clearly modifies an existing surface, invoke lisa-product-walkthrough here before proceeding.

Use Jira's web UI or lisa-atlassian-access operation: write-ticket (UPDATE form) to set the Development field / remote links where supported.

Phase 5 — Set Metadata

Before create/update, verify each field is populated where applicable:

• Labels: include at minimum one triage label if relevant (e.g. claude-triaged-{repo} is added later by triage, not here)
• Components: map from the modules the work touches
• Fix Version: set if the team uses versioned releases
• Priority: explicit — no "unset"
• Story points: estimate for Story/Task/Bug, skip for Epic/Spike
• Sprint: only if actively sprinting this work
• Assignee: leave unset if unknown rather than auto-assigning

Build-ready control input (build_ready)

build_ready is a write-control input governed by the ready-role-filing rule — cite that slug for the full contract; do not restate its per-vendor normalization table here. It decides whether a leaf work unit is promoted to the build-ready role on create. It never overrides leaf-only-lifecycle — a container is never promoted regardless of build_ready. Unlike the label-based trackers, JIRA tickets are already created not-ready (in the project's default initial status, e.g. TODO/Backlog); the build-ready role is the configured ready status (jira.workflow.ready, default Ready), reached by an explicit transition. JIRA is the vendor whose behavior the other two converged onto — this arm is unchanged by that normalization.

• Omitted → not build-ready: leave the ticket in the project's default created status. No transition. Ready is an explicit claim, never a vendor default.
• build_ready: false → same outcome as omitted, stated deliberately: the ticket waits in the project's default status for a human to promote it.
• build_ready: true → after create, transition the leaf to the resolved ready role so lisa-intake / lisa-jira-build-intake auto-picks it up (see Phase 6 CREATE step). Resolve the role name with the standard pattern (.jira.workflow.ready // Ready, local overrides global). Best-effort: if the transition is unreachable, record it and leave the ticket in its default status rather than failing the write.

A filing with neither is an incomplete handoff. A leaf that is not build-ready must carry an explicit human_gate: "<why a human must judge this first>"; nothing in the ready status means nothing ever claims it. When human_gate is supplied, stamp the hold on the ticket so it is auditable — a visible line plus the verbatim marker:

Held for a human product call: <reason>.
<!-- [lisa-human-gate] reason=<short-slug> -->

Stamp both surfaces, not just the marker. Also apply the configured human_needed marker label (jira.labels.human_needed, default Human Needed) to the ticket, via the ticket's labels field. The marker in the body and the label say the same thing, and a filing that carries only one of them is a half-armed gate: sweeps that read the body honour it, and sweeps that read labels do not. That is not hypothetical — the repair sweep that normalizes items carrying no lifecycle label keys on the absence of human_needed, so a marker-only hold was its population by construction and got promoted into the build queue (#3805). The marker remains the authoritative declaration; the label is what makes the hold visible to a person scanning a board and to any path that has not yet been routed through the shared reader. If the label does not exist in the tracker, create it, or record that it could not be applied and proceed — the marker still holds. Never file the label instead of the marker.

Write a reason= the release can name. The hold's reason is not decoration: a hold ends when a [lisa-human-gate-release] comment repeating that same reason= is recorded on the item, and the next intake sweep then takes the marker label off and puts the item back in the build-ready role on its own. Matching is per-reason so that a hold declared after an earlier release is not born discharged. A keyless hold is legal and is discharged by a keyless release; a hold whose reason is a paragraph is legal and nobody will reproduce it. Prefer a short slug the person answering it can retype. Do not instruct anyone to delete the marker from the description to lift the hold — the only body write available is a whole-body replacement, so that asks them to rewrite the whole record to clear one line, which is why answered holds accumulated instead of being lifted (CodySwannGT/lisa#3852). The marker stays as history; the release is recorded beside it.

If a leaf arrives with build_ready omitted or false and no human_gate, do not create it: report the incomplete handoff and name both ways to resolve it (build_ready: true, or a human_gate reason). Containers are exempt — their status rolls up from children, so they need neither.

Phase 5.5 — Validate (Pre-write Gate)

Before any write, invoke lisa-jira-validate-ticket with the full proposed spec assembled from Phases 2 / 3 / 4 / 5. Pass it as a YAML block per the lisa-jira-validate-ticket schema, including runtime_behavior_change, authenticated_surface, and artifacts_attached flags so the right gates run.

The validator is the single source of truth for what makes a valid ticket. The same gates are used by lisa-notion-to-tracker dry-run, by lisa-jira-verify post-write, and here. Do not re-implement gate logic in this skill — if a gate needs to change, change lisa-jira-validate-ticket so every caller benefits.

If the validator reports FAIL:

• Surface the failure list and the per-gate remediation to the user.
• Do NOT proceed to Phase 6. Fix the spec (or stop and ask the human) and re-run validation.
• Never invoke lisa-atlassian-access with operation: write-ticket while the validator's verdict is FAIL.

If the validator reports PASS, continue to Phase 6.

Phase 6 — Create or Update

Before calling lisa-atlassian-access, keep the description in Lisa's normal Markdown/wiki-heading authoring shape; the access layer owns conversion through scripts/markdown-to-adf.mjs and writes ADF to JIRA. This is required because acli stores raw Markdown/wiki text as one literal paragraph when no ADF object is provided. Post-write verification must confirm the live description contains ADF heading nodes for the required sections, not literal ## / h2. text in a paragraph.

CREATE

1. Invoke lisa-atlassian-access via the Skill tool with operation: write-ticket payload: {...} containing all Phase 2/3/5 fields and the epic parent from Phase 4a (CREATE form — no existing key).
2. Capture the returned ticket key.
3. For each relationship from Phase 4b, invoke lisa-atlassian-access with operation: link from: <K1> to: <K2> type: "<link-type>". Use the exact link-type names supported by the project; surface errors if an unknown type is passed.
4. Attach remote links from Phase 4c (via lisa-atlassian-access operation: write-ticket UPDATE form or whatever remote-link operation is dispatched).
5. If the ticket changes runtime behavior, invoke the lisa-jira-add-journey skill to append the Validation Journey section.
6. Build-ready promotion (only when build_ready: true and the ticket is a leaf work unit): transition the new ticket to the resolved ready status via lisa-atlassian-access operation: transition key: <K> to: "<ready-status>" (resolve <ready-status> as .jira.workflow.ready // Ready, local overrides global). Skip this step entirely when build_ready is omitted or false, or for any container. If the transition is unreachable, record it and leave the ticket in its default status — do not fail the write.

UPDATE

1. Invoke lisa-atlassian-access with operation: write-ticket payload: {key: <K>, ...fields-being-changed}. Do NOT resend fields that weren't in the change set — it blows away history.
2. Add new relationships via lisa-atlassian-access operation: link from: <K1> to: <K2> type: "<link-type>". Existing links are not touched unless explicitly removed.
3. If description changes, preserve sections you are not editing. Re-read via /jira-read-ticket first, including any existing canonical managed ## Lisa Usage section unless the caller intentionally supplied an updated canonical section. Use the shared lisa-usage-accounting serializer/merge path rather than freehand edits to ledger rows.

Phase 7 — Verify

Call the lisa-jira-verify skill on the resulting ticket. lisa-jira-verify fetches the live ticket and runs lisa-jira-validate-ticket against it — same gates as Phase 5.5, but applied to what JIRA actually stored (catches anything dropped or reformatted on write, including Markdown/wiki descriptions that degraded into one literal text paragraph instead of ADF heading nodes). If it reports failures, fix them before returning. Do not report success on a ticket that fails verify.

Phase 8 — Announce

Post a creation comment via lisa-atlassian-access operation: comment key: <K> body: "..." with:

• [{repo}] prefix if the ticket is repo-scoped
• Who the ticket is assigned to (if known)
• The relationships that were set (blocks, is blocked by, relates to) with links
• Any remote PRs attached

Skip this step only on UPDATE when no material change was made.

Writing by a bespoke path (your own script, direct API or GraphQL)

Nothing here stops a consumer from writing to JIRA through the JIRA REST API directly, acli, or your own script, and nothing should try to — a script that owns the credential plumbing is often the only practical transport. The transport is not the gate. A bespoke write path still owes both halves of the quality gate this skill runs, and owes them explicitly, because no phase of this flow will ever run for it.

A bespoke script's own read-back does not discharge either obligation. Re-reading the ticket and confirming JIRA stored what was sent proves transport, not quality: it shows the fields round-tripped and says nothing about whether what was sent clears a single gate. An agent that reads VERIFIED out of such a script has been told the ticket was checked when it was not. Measured once, on one ticket, on 2026-09-03 (CodySwannGT/lisa#3663): a local script's read-back was clean on every field, and the ticket then failed gates S5, S9 and S18 when the validator was run against it by hand.

What a bespoke write path still owes — the same two checks, invoked by hand:

1. Pre-write validate, the obligation Phase 5.5 discharges here. Invoke lisa-jira-validate-ticket via the Skill tool with the proposed spec as a YAML block before writing. Never write on a FAIL verdict.
2. Post-write verify, the obligation Phase 7 discharges here. Invoke lisa-jira-verify via the Skill tool with the identifier of the ticket you just wrote — or lisa-jira-validate-ticket directly in identifier mode, which fetches and validates the live state. Never report success on a FAIL verdict.

Both run standalone against an existing live ticket; lisa-jira-validate-ticket documents the copy-pasteable invocation under its standalone entry point.

Three outcomes, never two. PASS, FAIL and could not validate are distinct results. If the validator did not run to a verdict — the skill was unavailable, a credential was missing, the ticket could not be fetched — that is not a pass. Report it as unvalidated and say why. Collapsing "could not validate" into "validated" is the same misreading as trusting a read-back.

These are skills, not scripts. lisa-jira-validate-ticket and lisa-jira-verify are plugin-resident and invoked through the Skill tool. They are not expected to appear in any repository's scripts/ directory, and their absence from one is not evidence that the capability is missing — searching the repository you happen to be standing in is the wrong search.

Rules

• Never create a non-bug ticket without an epic parent.
• Never skip relationship discovery — both the git history search AND the JQL search must run, and their outcomes must be recorded on the ticket. "None found" is acceptable only when it's documented.
• Never create a Bug, Task, Sub-task, or Improvement that spans multiple repos. Split it before creating.
• Never include a runtime-behavior ticket without a target backend environment, and never include an authenticated-surface ticket without sign-in credentials in the description.
• Never invent custom field values. If the project requires a field you don't have, stop and ask.
• Never overwrite a description without reading the current version first.
• Preserve an existing canonical ## Lisa Usage section on update; never append a second usage section or silently drop ledger rows.
• All writes go through this skill so best practices are enforced uniformly. Downstream skills (e.g. lisa-jira-create) should delegate here rather than invoking lisa-atlassian-access write operations directly.
• The gate logic (what makes a valid ticket) lives in lisa-jira-validate-ticket, NOT in this skill. This skill calls the validator at Phase 5.5 (pre-write) and Phase 7 (via lisa-jira-verify post-write). When a gate needs to change, change it in lisa-jira-validate-ticket — every caller (write path, dry-run path, post-write verify) picks it up automatically.