Ways to bypass Epic Name?

[Johan Markström]

Dear community,

I've gotten some feedback from people in my organization regarding the Epic Name field. It seems to be regarded as unneccesary, as it's not clear what information should be provided here. Furthermore, the Epic Name being displayed in some situations (Epics Panel, card layout) and the Epic Summary being displayed in others (Roadmap), seems to cause confusion. 

The solution amongst the PO's/PL's so far, is to manually copy the Epic Name from the Summary field.

I've been looking into automating this manual task with Jira Automations, but I can only perform this action for the edit field trigger and not for the create issue trigger (when created from the navbar).

Since the default behaviour when creating an Epic from the roadmap is to populate the Epic Name field with the Summary field, there should be an option provided to automate this for other create screens. In my opinion. 

Has anyone had similar complaints regarding the Epic Name field? Has any of you found a good solution for this? 

Thanks! 

[Mikael Sandberg]

This should go away soon when Epic name will become optional, here is the original article from last year outlining the changes that are coming to Epics, and if the timeline is still the same this should happen around 3/22, so starting next week.

[Johan Markström]

Great news! I remember reading something about changes coming to Epic name earlier this year, but nothing seemed to change and I started to doubt the changes were coming. I couldn't follow the link you supplied, do you maybe have a link to their timeline for these changes? Thanks! 

[Mikael Sandberg]

Looks like the link was duplicated when I posted it, here is the correct link, https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-articles/Upcoming-changes-to-epic-fields-in-company-managed-projects/ba-p/1997562

[Johan Markström]

Superb, thanks! 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

For a bit of background, yes, a lot of us have been complaining about this for a long, long time.

Most of the ecosystem has seen the dual summary / epic-name as, at best, a tiresome waste of effort, and at worst, utter nonsense.  From the beginning, most of us simply wanted the summary to work as the epic-name.

It was not designed this way, it's an accident.  Jira Software is a (heavily, but still not as much as we would like) refactored plugin that Atlassian acquired when they realised they needed to do something about supporting the rapidly growing numbers of Agile teams.

And that's the core of it.  As a 3rd-party plugin (now "apps"), it could not quite get deep into the core of Jira as it would need to, and the "Epic name" field was a bit of a bodge to get around it.

We're still not going to get a proper fix for it, as @Mikael Sandberg points out, but at least making it optional means we can let people do things like automate copying the summary into the epic-name when that would be useful!

[Johan Markström]

Had no idea Jira SW started out as a plugin. Thanks for the in-depth explanation! 

[Olha Yevdokymova_SaaSJet]

Hello @Johan Markström !

If you’re looking to automate your tasks and prefill fields like sprint, epic, and label automatically, I would highly recommend trying the Recurring Checklist and Report add-on for Jira developed by my team. It’s a great tool that allows you to set rules for your recurring issues and tasks. You can find more info about the prefilling field in this article ! 

I hope this helps. Let me know if you need anything else.