Best practice for consolidating custom fields

Darrel Jackson

I have a Jira Cloud instance that has organically grown from a number of disparate teams using their own custom Jira configurations to an organisation-wide instance. As an admin I'm trying to reign in some custom configuration and either simplify them or just use out of the box fields. As an example, I have 4 different custom fields that all record defect severity for Bug issue types.

When I identify a duplicate custom field what I'd like to do is migrate the data to another field (either custom or out-of-the-box) then remove the old field. Let's assume all these fields are single value drop-downs.

What I think I need to do is this:

1. Add the new field to every screen the old field is on.

2. For each value in the current drop-down, find all the issues with that value.

3. Bulk edit those issues to set the corresponding drop-down value of the new field.

4. Once all drop-down values migrated, remove the old custom field.

The trouble I have is step 2 is very labour intensive as there are many custom fields and many drop-down values. Also for some reason I often can't see the new field in the bulk edit screen.

Am I doing it right? Any best practices that may be better?

Prince Nyeche - ELFAPP

Hi @Darrel Jackson 

Welcome to Community! You can use the CSV importer feature from Jira Settings to achieve this. I would suggest, you identify all the issues that contains the source field data to know where they all exist then export those issues with that old field visible (as it will contain it's present data) and add the new field data on the screen of the project as well.

While using the CSV importer from the External system import, this works well for single select list field, so you can map the field during the setup on the External system import configuration then initialise the process. Please note that you will require the issue key field, summary field can be left blank but needed. So you can bulk update those fields and its values. That's how to go about consolidating fields on Jira Cloud, without knowing any corresponding values as each issue can have different values on the old field.