How can i reduce the customfields in the design?

Question

Hi All,

Customer came to us with a new requirement of 40+ unique customfields. We tried mapping to some of our existing customfields, but we would match only few handful.

Can anyone suggest me, what should be the next approach? Our architecture board does not allow us to create so many customfields for one project. Is there any plugin which takes care of it? or any suggestion.

Please check.

Thanks in advance

Binisha

Andrew Laden · Answer

If the fields aren't going to be directly used in reporting/filtering (or other cases where you would need to explicity reference them in jira itself, one option would be to use a single well/fixed formatted free text field.

You could then use Issue Templates for Jira Addon to control population of the field at issue creation.

This wouldn't even rule out some automation, though you would have to write a routine to parse the single field into its individual components.

Ricky Lin_4ca5w9 · Answer

My experience with this many custom fields (probably close to +30) was when I got involved in our HR new hire/termination process and it made sense for our future usage (since Jira OOTB doesn't have a whole lot of "HR" fields)

I personally would focus on the "why" behind these 40+ unique custom fields and see if they're truly needed.  A CF is typically created to capture unique and reportable data, but would also involve more entry (manual or automated) within a ticket.

Try to understand how they plan on use/capture all the unique information within a workflow and see if this request really reasonable and feasible to maintain and use.  It'd suck for you to go through with this only for users to find out that it's too complicated to use.

Joe Pitt · Answer

A plugin would just generate more custom fields. If you're going to restrict creating new fields I suggest you reevaluate what you have in the light of making the fields generic enough for multiple projects to use them. Have you talked to them about using the preexisting fields and what the max number of fields you can create for them? Does the request look reasonable? If so, and the project is important enough it may make sense to give them most of what they are asking for. I've been involved in situations like this and the board may have never thought about a project as complicated as this.