What is the Parent field for in JIRA (Cloud)

[Andrea Sloan]

I was told Parent is the field that replaced Epic in the new JIRA (Cloud) version. What is the difference in business usage between the two fields.  I always used Epic but I am not understanding why now the Epic Summary is displaying instead of the Epic name? What is the reason? If I want my issue to just display an Epic Name but make sure the Epic also has a summary somewhere explaining what this Epic name is the label where would I now put that?

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Andrea Sloan 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

You are asking about different topics; use of Epic Name vs. use of the Parent field.

Atlassian switched to displaying Summary for Epics instead of Epic Name to make Epics more consistent between Company Managed and Team Managed projects in Cloud. Team Managed projects never used the Epic Name field. Other changes were also made for consistency.

The changes to Epics in Cloud are described in various posts:

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-articles/Upcoming-Rename-epics-in-your-company-managed-projects/ba-p/1874726

https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-articles/Upcoming-changes-to-epic-fields-in-company-managed-projects/ba-p/1997562

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/maintain-epic-link-data-for-issues-above-the-epic-level/

If you want to have a short value display for the Epics in their child issues then I suggest that you shorten the content of the Summary field in the Epics and use the Description field for a longer description of the Epic.

The change to using the Parent field instead of the Epic Link field is again aligning consistency and ease of use. The identification of any given issue's parent is now maintained in the Parent field where previously it could be in the Parent, Parent Link, or Epic Link field depending on the issue type.