Bulk Changes

Question

I work for a large corporation that has recently started using JIRA.  I am managing a Kanban board within a project - but I am not a JIRA Administrator.  We have approximately 500 stories.

My question:  Is it possible to process a bulk change to move content from one field to another.  For example:  If we have something in Field A that we want to move to Field B in all of our stories - is there an easy way to do this without going story by story through the entire backlog?

I was hoping for some sort of way to maybe export the board into an Excel file, make the edits in Excel, and then re-upload the file and overwrite the stories that are there.  I did find an "Excel manager" app that looked promising, but unfortunately I do not have the tech admin privileges to install the software / add-on.

If it helps - it appears I'm on JIRA v7.6.6.

Jack Brickey · Answer

are the issues in a single status? If so consider this:

* Have your admin create a unique transition called say "Transpose"
* This transition will exit and enter the same status
* Add a post function to Copy Field (from A to B)
* Add a post function to clear field A (assuming you want A cleared)
* be sure the PF are in the appropriate order
* run a JQL to retrieve the desired issues and perform a bulk edit "Transition" using this new transition
* have admin remove the temp transition

if the issues are in various status then the above transition would need to be reused for each status which might be tedious for sure.

adam.parker_ghxeng · Answer

Thank you for the quick reply @Jimmy Seddon - I appreciate it.

A clarifying question for you:  If the content in the field is different for every story, will the bulk change feature work?

A bit more context:  Because we aren't truly a Scrum / Agile team, we were using the Story Points field to track location information (a numeric value representing the location of the story submitter).  We have about 215 unique location values.  We are looking to move that data in kind out of the Story Points field and into the "Benefits / Value" field where we can expand on it.

So what I'm looking for is a sort of "lift and shift" functionality.  Will the Bulk Change that you highlighted above work for that sort of ask?

Jimmy Seddon · Answer

Hi @adam.parker,

Welcome to the Community!

You would likely need to ask your Jira Administrator to make a permission change to accomplish this.  If you have them give you the global permission "Make bulk changes", you should be able to run the query that your kanban board is based on to get a list of issues, and from there you will have the option to edit all the issues in the list at once.

I hope that helps!

-Jimmy