I am using Jira now for nearly 20 years professionally and also used it for some private projects. And I have seen several companies just use Jira wrong because Jira Admins just restricted some things and people just finding it too complicated and also companies switching or wanting to switch due to being used incorrectly and people making it too complicated on top of some things already be overly complicated by Jira itself.
I never understood Atlassian's decision behind Epics being so complicated myself.
Epics have a some things double and they are used for different and very specific things in Jira. There is a summary and an Epic name, there is a status and an epic status.
Epic name:
To me it just looks like someone wanted some very specific feature like a shorter epic link name or have a different name in Boards for Epics so they can change it however they like. But by making this not an optional field but a fixed field you have to use it.
Meaning if I do not want to use a different epic name compared to the summary I have to change both fields just to keep it the same in case I ever want to rename an Epic because of a typo or just want to change the name of the Epic (everywhere).
For me having Epic name and summary should not be fixed fields. I am totally fine with having Epic name in there for certain things but if I do not select the Epic name myself why not just always use the Summary.
Epic status:
I still have not really figured out why someone wanted to give Epics an additional separate status. The Epic status controls for example if it is still shown as Epic Link in tickets and in Roadmaps. Why not just use the regular status for that. If you want to add additional Tickets to an Epic just open it, add them and close them again. Sure those are a few steps.
But if you want to add additional tickets to an Epic after it was set to done someone already fucked up. To me it looks like it is just a lazy way to obscuring the real status of an epic and by doing so just making it complex.
The only reason for it is a developer felt it was too dangerous because everyone can change status workflows and add additional status and therefore it is not clear when an epic is actually done done. But to me that is no reason but something you could have done with a specific status workflow for epics if you really think it would be an issue.
I would be quite interested how many people actually are using these additional fields regularly and especially what is the reason you are using them for.
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