What happens when you delete an old status options for your epic?

Question

We're changing the way we manage things and are introducing new statuses into our epic workflow. The new ones don't map to the old ones. So we want to introduce the new statuses and delete the old ones.

My question is what will happen to old epics which are using the old status options? What will is say for their status? Will this cause any issues I should consider?

Thanks in advance for the help!

unknown · Answer

Thank you so much for the thorough and immediate response Alexey! :)

Alexey Matveev · Answer

Hello,

First of all, you will need to create a copy of the current workflow because you will not be able to delete statuses in the active workflow. Then you make all changes to the copy workflow and associate the copy workflow to the workflow scheme. After that you will have to publish the workflow scheme and Jira will ask you to map absent issue statuses to the new ones. Then Jira will make changes to the statuses. All your Epics will be set to the new statuses according to your mapping. That would  be all.

Then if you used old statuses in JQL filters, those filters will stop working. You will need to change JQL queries in the filters.