Allow users to configure completed issue retention period in new Jira Plans (native Plans)

[YaWen]

n the new native Jira Plans, completed issues are automatically hidden from the Timeline and List views after approximately 2–4 weeks. There is no user-facing setting to adjust this retention period or disable this behavior. This makes it impossible to view the full project history in a Plan, which is critical for tracking milestones, reporting, and retrospectives.

Current Behavior:

• Issues with a "Done" status category are automatically hidden from Plans after a certain number of days (approximately 2–4 weeks after resolution).

• There is no "Exclusion rules" setting, "Show completed work" toggle, or any other UI option available at the Plan level, project level, or global admin level to control this behavior.

• The Status filter in the Plan's filter bar does not override this automatic hiding — even when "Done" is explicitly selected, older completed issues remain hidden.

• This affects both Timeline and List views within Plans.

Expected Behavior:

Users should be able to:

1. Configure the retention period for completed issues in Plans (e.g., show issues completed within the last 30 / 60 / 90 / 180 days, or show all).

2. Disable automatic hiding entirely so that all completed issues remain visible in the Plan regardless of when they were resolved.

3. Control this setting at the Plan level, so different Plans can have different retention policies based on their use case.

Use Case:

We use Jira Plans to track multi-phase hardware development projects (e.g., stages with multiple parallel workstreams). Each stage contains 10+ tasks assigned to different teams. Some tasks are completed weeks or months before the stage is fully signed off.

When these early-completed tasks disappear from the Plan, it creates an incomplete and misleading view of the project:

• Project managers cannot see the full timeline of completed work within a stage.

• It becomes difficult to verify that all required tasks were completed before a milestone.

• Historical project tracking and retrospectives are compromised.

• Team members lose visibility into cross-functional progress.

Workarounds Attempted (all insufficient):

• Filtering by Status = Done in the Plan filter bar → older Done issues still hidden

• Searching for "Exclusion rules" in Plan settings → does not exist in new native Plans

• Checking global admin settings → no Plans-specific retention setting found

• Switching to List view → same issues are hidden

• Adding &showCompleted=true to the URL → no effect

Impact:

This limitation affects any team using Plans for long-running projects where tasks are completed at different times. Without the ability to view all completed work, Plans cannot serve as a reliable single source of truth for project progress.

Requested Priority: High — this was a configurable feature in the legacy Advanced Roadmaps (via Exclusion rules) and should be carried forward to the new native Plans experience.

[Gabriela]

Hi @Yawen, welcome to the community.

That exclusion rule from Advanced Roadmaps is still in native Plans, just renamed, which is why searching for "Exclusion rules" came up empty. It's now the Removed work items tab.

Next to your plan's name in the sidebar, open More actions (•••) → Plan settings → Work in your plan → Removed work items → View rules. The relevant one reads "Remove work marked Done more than [X] days" and defaults to 30. Raise that number (say 365 or higher) and your completed hardware tasks stay put on the Timeline and List views.

Two limits to flag. There's no hard off switch and no global default across plans, so you set it per-plan and by days only. And the rule only applies to work items from company-managed projects.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/set-an-exclusion-rule-in-advanced-roadmaps/

Best, Gabriela