Customize your GitHub Copilot for Jira experience

GitHub walks through ways to tailor the GitHub Copilot for Jira integration so teams can get to draft pull requests faster and avoid repeating the same setup instructions.

Overview

The video focuses on customizing how GitHub Copilot behaves when it is invoked from Jira work items.

Customize instructions at the Jira ticket (work item) level

• Add instructions directly in an individual Jira work item to influence how Copilot handles that specific task.
• Use this to provide task-specific guidance (for example, when a ticket is about an API refactor).

Customize instructions at the Jira space (project-wide) level

• Configure space-level settings so defaults apply across the entire Jira space/project.
• This helps standardize how Copilot is used by the team and reduces repeated manual instructions.

Route specific tasks to custom agents

• Route certain categories of work (example given: API refactors) to custom agents directly from a Jira ticket.

Set defaults to reduce repetition

Examples of defaults mentioned:

• Target repository
• Branch naming conventions

These defaults are intended to speed up the path from a Jira ticket to a draft pull request by making Copilot start with the right assumptions.