Epic Link Required via Workflow Create Action, but is not being respect on "Move"

Question

In jira software, you are unable to set the epic link (or parent) field as a required field through the field configuration.

However, I was able to work around this by adding a condition to the Create action on the workflow to make the epic link required.

However, it does not work when issues are moved from one project to another. Are there any other solutions out there we can explore to ensure the epic is required when issues are moved into X project.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Sorry, I simply can't think of a way natively that you can enforce a Create Transition Validation during a Move.

You could consider taking away the PMs permission to move issues, and instead use a manually triggered Automation Rule. That rule could include a prompt for them to enter an Epic issue key to attach the issue to, and then check during the automation execution that they provided a valid Epic key. If that validation failed you could have the rule send them an email and abort the rest of the rule.

Automation can't be used to execute a Move operation, but you could execute a Clone operation and an Issue Delete of the original issue. You would not get the history of the original issue in that case, unfortunately.

Maybe there is a third party app in the Marketplace that can supplant the Move Issue functionality that would help.

Jeffrey Bistrong · Answer

thank you yes, all of those a plausable solutions, but the root problem is that our Product Managers won't add the epic unless it's required. So none of those solutions would work for us. The only way we can do it is to make the epic required upon create.

I thought about making the epic link required in order to "in progress" but that would cause more of an annoyance to the developers and not the intended target of the product managers.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Jeffrey Bistrong

The Create transition validator is not applied during a Move because a new issue is not being created. Rather, and issue is being updated (re-keyed) to change its parent project.

I don't know of a way to block the Move operation. I can only think of ways to detect the problem after the Move.

You could use an Automation Rule with the Issue Moved trigger to detect that an issue has been moved into the project, check if the issue has a parent Epic, and if it does not then send an email to somebody.

You could add Validators to the other transitions in the workflow to prevent an issue without a parent Epic from being changed to another status.

You could use a Saved Filter to find the issues that don't have a parent Epic and use a subscription to the filter to schedule an email to yourself to let you know that such exists.