What do you do when an old issue is no longer relevant because of a new issue?

[Brandon]

My team and I have been using Jira Software for four years now. In that time, we have amassed over 2000 issues. I do my best to link related tickets and use descriptive labels to help see the full scope of an issue, from past to present.

Sometimes, though, we'll have an issue completed long ago and a newer issue that makes the old solution irrelevant. For example, issue EX-500 updated our deploy step to sync specific files on our server with an S3 bucket. Two years later, issue EX-1200 circumvents the need to sync during the deploy step by storing these files in an S3 bucket from the get-go.

In the above example, EX-500 is "Done," and so is EX-1200. They are linked, but it can become time-consuming to understand what is going on over time. In a case like this one, the solution for EX-1200 entirely replaced that of EX-500, and while I want to retain both issues, I'm wondering if there is a better way to make it evident that EX-500 is no longer relevant.

I'm guessing I am not the only person to wonder about this. Has anyone in the community encountered a similar problem, and if so, what did you do about it?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Most common one I've seen is pretty much what you've done - an issue link between the issues, often called "Deprecates / Deprecated by".  

For one of them, I helped build some scripts to show data from these links in searches and on the issues themselves.

[Teresa_DevSamurai]

I using Jira's custom fields or tags to label or categorize issues based on their relevance or importance. This can help me to easily identify which issues are still relevant and which have been replaced.