How does your company manage fields used only in forms?

[Jeremy Wood]

Hello Atlassian Community,

I am currently working on trying to cleanup our fields within our environment and am running into fields that are used only on forms. Because they are only used in a form, they appear as if they are not used at all. They show 0 screens, and say they are used in 0 spaces. But if you check the form, its clearly used. Or may have been used in the past. 

I want to make sure I'm not deleting fields that are needed for historic form data, or even worse being used in current forms. Is there a good way to easily identify these?  

[John Funk]

Hi Jeremy,

So you are saying that there is a field on a form that is linked to a Jira custom field? 

Or there's just a field on a form and not linked to a custom field? 

If linked to a field, then I assume the same field is not present on any screens? 

[Jeremy Wood]

Hi John. Yes. We have a field on a form that is linked to a Jira Custom Field. But that custom field is not on any screens. So it shows up on the form, and contains data that needs to be kept. But from the fields settings menu, it says its used in 0 spaces. 

[Susan Waldrip]

Hi @Jeremy Wood and @John Funk , this is an interesting question. With the changes being made to field configurations and schemes, and the addition of field optimization mechanisms, how is Atlassian "counting" field use? I have fields on forms that are linked to Jira fields, so are those fields counted as being used simply by being populated from a form, or only the fields actually on screens that are manually completed or via automation? I would think any field with data, even if the data is temporary (like a calculation field instead of using a variable), would count as being used.

[John Funk]

Agreed - I would think it would show those fields as being used even if not on a screen. I would also think that it would show all of the Spaces that have work item with a value in the field. 

@Jeremy Wood  - A couple of things - I never rely on that information related to the field anyway. I usually create a query like: "Field ABC" is not empty 

with Field ABC being the actual field name. Then I add a column to the filter for Updated and sort by the most recent one at the top. It's not perfect, but I should be able to get a least an idea of when those work items were updated, whether if was the field or not. 

Another way would be to use the Revyz Configuration Manager for Jira app which I think can show you recent usage.