Best Practice for maxing out work items

[Jamie Stanczyk]

Good day everyone! I wanted to try and understand what teams are doing when they begin to max out the number of work items per space (formally known as project). We currently have company-managed scrum software projects in our Jira instance and I know that we need to start planning. 

With knowing that 5000 work items per space is the maximum, what are some best practices for still keeping the data and not outright deleting work items?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Jamie Stanczyk 

Those 5000 item limits you found apply to how many items can be displayed within a Plan and a Board. That limit does not apply to how many items you have in the underlying Space.

When Plans and Boards are set up with sources/filters that will pull more than 5000 items then the Plan/Board will be constrained to displaying no more than 5000 items.

If you need to contain more than 5000 items in a board or plan, that (in my opinion) is likely to make the plan/board unwieldy to work with.

What is your use case where you would need to have more than 5000 active/visible within a Plan or Board?

[Jamie Stanczyk]

Trudy - thank you for the response. I am afraid it is some human error on this one, because I was originally under the impression that the maximum amount of work items pertained to the space as a whole, not a singular plan or board.

[Sam Okell]

Hi @Jamie Stanczyk 

Curious where you've seen the max work items is 5000 - one of our spaces has over 100k work items and no running into any issues at all, still way below recommended usages by Atlassian.

Thanks,

Sam

[Jamie Stanczyk]

Sam, thank you for that reply. As I continue to go through the research rabbit hole, I am noticing conflicting information the following:

• Max of 5000 work items on plans
• Max of 5000 per board

Sam, for your project, if you have over 100k work items, do you have several boards to separate all of the work items?

[Sam Okell]

Our project is actually a JSM project, so don't use boards, but we have Jira projects with 20k+.

As Trudy mentioned, the limit is purely the display limit. If if you 6,000 tickets, but 4,000 are closed, then the board will eventually hide these from view, leaving the 2,000 to view.

All tickets are still available, such as in the List view, or via a Filter etc, but they are never deleted, they will always be available.

For your use case, I don't think you should really have any issues!