bulk updating project status

[Michael Pendleton]

I have dozens of old projects that still say "open" in the status. I want to change that word to "done" or "closed" or something else. Is there a command for doing that in bulk?

Thank you!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Jira does not have a native "project status", it works with issues.

Could you explain where you are seeing this project status?

[Michael Pendleton]

Yes, perhaps "projects" is something we defined internally. Nevertheless, if I do an issue search as follows:

project in (NEWS) AND Labels in (email_revenue) AND status in (Open, "In Progress", Reopened, Dev, "Ready for Live", Design, Spec, "Spec Review", "Bug Fixing", "Dev QA / Bug Fix", "Live QA / Bug Fix", Live, "Ready For Dev", Prioritized, Resolved, Backlog, Requirements, "Ready for QA") ORDER BY updated DESC, due DESC

Let's say I want to change ALL results that come back with an "Open" in the Status column. Can I bulk change those to "Resolved" or "Backlog" or whatever else?

Thank you!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, there's often a difference between Jira-project and real-life-project - it's actually quite rare that a jira-project is a direct 1:1 match with a real-life-project.

Stating that, and then giving us the JQL you are working with is a fantastic answer to my request for a bit of clarification.  Thank you!

When you say your project is "open", it translates into Jira-speak as "a collection of issues (maybe in different Jira-projects) that are showing as open, so the project looks to be open".

The good news here is that yes, you can bulk-edit the issues, to get them closed off.

The bad news is that it might not be simple.

To get started, run your search.  You'll get a list of issues displayed in the issue navigator (the gridded and paginated view of a list of issues).  Look to the top-right-ish for the options menu (a simple ... ) and click it.

Now the complexities begin:

• That menu will, hopefully, contain "bulk edit".  If it does not, then you do not have the global "bulk edit" permission.  You *really* need this to avoid having to go one issue at a time, so ask your admins to grant it to you.
• When you use it, you'll be asked a few questions
  • Are you sure you want to hit this list of issues?  This is a nice bit, you can select or deselect within the original list of issues you searched for - your initial search does not need to be 100% accurate)
  • What do you want to do with them?  Also nice, because you are not limited to "edit", you can delete, transition, move and do some other more Jira-specific stuff
• If needed, you'll be asked to provide data to fill in or replace 
• You will be warned about data loss

And the next round of complexity

• It can only work with 1000 issues at a time (last time I tried it, the limit was 1k)
• You can only take one action at a time.  If, for example, you have 10,000 issues, but only 350 of them can be transitioned from "to do" to "done", when you select that, all the others will drop out of the process
• You must have permission in each project you are hitting issues in, to do what the bulk action is

And the bad bit is Jira doesn't tell you about the blockers until the end. 

Imagine I've got 50 issues across 20 projects.  I've got "edit" in 19 of the projects, I try to bulk-edit the priority field for the 50 issues, the damn thing will fail at the last step becuase I don't have permission to edit one issue from the list.  (I want it to fail far earllier)

But, try it.

I would start with 

• "Let's say I want to change ALL results that come back with an "Open" in the Status column. Can I bulk change those to "Resolved" or "Backlog" or whatever else?"
• Project in (x, y, z) and status = Open
• Bulk edit -> transition issues -> select target status -> do it

In this case, you may be offered loads of different status.  I'm afraid that's also "can only do one thing at a time" - you'll need to iterate through each different option.

But it's faster than "amend one issue at a time"