Upcoming changes to epic fields in company-managed projects

228 comments

Juan Cubillos June 27, 2023

Hi.Thanks for this new.

Carys Williams-Hind June 27, 2023

I know a few people are saying they were contacted about the change but we are still very new to Jira and this was not something we were aware of. We now have the issue that the name exported to one of our other systems now doesn't match. I don't understand why you would use summary. The name was easy to see on a backlog and the summary is a long explanation of what the Epic is (or at least that is how we were using it). Not a great change in my mind.

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AJ Canepa June 28, 2023

I agree with Chris that the having the Epic is all uppercase hurts readability.  I also prefer descriptive Epic short names, and I feel like the width of the Epic pillbox displayed in the backlog is way too small.  Can we get a setting to specify the pixel width for that pillbox in the board settings please, or a column width that each individual user can drag to set this based on their screen size?

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Dean Steptoe June 28, 2023

I'll add to the general sentiment here that this change has made a mess of our boards.  Our teams preferred the previous use of Epic Name and have used that extensively.  Since it seems unlikely that the change will be rolled back, can there be a configuration option to use the Epic Name rather than the Summary on the boards and other places?

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Chad Hester June 29, 2023

I came here just to echo what others have said.

Many of us use a shorter epic name specifically for labels, and a longer label in the summary. This change causes a usability issue and readability issue, especially when combined with the label text formatting. The characters are truncated sooner.

Why all-caps? Again, this contributes to the usability/readability issue.

Minimally, there should be options to use the Epic Name value again, and to use better formatting for the label.

How exactly was this change billed as an "improvement"? What improved? Was that more valuable compared to what we lost in usability?

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lila June 29, 2023

This is insane and doesnt make sense. The epic name should be displayed in the backlog not its summary! This makes everything very hard to read. 

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Mithun Patil July 1, 2023

Bunch of Dumb Product team to update nonsense details making it more confusing for the Sprint and Backlog management users.

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John Price
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July 3, 2023

OK, I assume this is rolled out because 

parent is not empty and issuetype = story 

returns a lot of results.  However, the field Epic Link still appears on my story screen, and Parent won't even if I manually add it.  Can someone clarify how this works?  Do I still put in values for Epic Link, but they get copied to Parent?  Or should I be removing Epic Link from screens and replacing it with Parent?

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Majken Longlade July 4, 2023

I don't understand the point of keeping the Epic Name available, if it won't be used on the board if it's filled in. Its purpose was to allow for a prettier label on boards. I have to say it didn't click with me the implications of this change because of that.

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Chris Bodenlos July 5, 2023

🚮 Thanks Jira team - more work is always appreciated!

 All of our Epics now display a mostly useless string rather than a descriptive label.

 

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Brian Osam-Duodu July 12, 2023

My epics are now showing in my kanban board even though they are done.

How can I get them to disappear?

Melanie Pasztor July 25, 2023

Why not make the Epic Status optional? And/or provide a 'Status' custom field type that can be displayed as the tag in agile boards and backlogs? And/or allow the use of labels or component tags instead?

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Irene
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August 3, 2023

@Brian Osam-Duodu Make sure that when you go into the Epic issue view, the issue status is also mark as Done, or belongs in a Done status category.

Bill Sheboy
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August 4, 2023

What do people think of improved change management on improvements like this? 

Specifically, perhaps outline the changes in a table format, with or without target dates, the last-updated-date for information, and indicate progress periodically.  That will certainly help the community of users to know when something is broken, "rolling out", or "functions as designed".

Perhaps the ideas from the "Recently updated Jira KB articles" could be leveraged for improved change management: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/recently-updated-jira-kb-articles-cloud-1063169255.html

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Douglas August 8, 2023

In the backlog view, the lozenge used to show a short name, which could be a cryptic tag; a descriptive summary does not fit in the lozenge.  The BEFORE/AFTER pictures do not reflect that the summary now will be limited to only part of a truly descriptive epic.  Try viewing the backlog with an epic named and summarized something like:

Name: Name123_fixup

Summary: Fixup of testable characters in Name123

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Hanna Torany September 12, 2023

Can we remove or Hide the field "Epic Name" ?

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Ruslan Platonov September 19, 2023

Epic names were very useful for displaying as a badge in list of issues and scrum boards. I want to have a human readable epic summary and a very short epic name so that it fits the badge size. What I have now is not manageable truncated text which is really frustrating. 

Is there any way to bring back this feature?

Screenshot 2023-09-19 163323.png

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Carlos Garcia Navarro
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September 22, 2023

Thanks for sharing this! These are positive changes, and I'm sure they'll be welcome by many! :-)

Kimberly Phillipp October 24, 2023

Epic name is now optional, so far so good, however when it is empty it breaks what is being displayed in reports (e.g. version report). Is anyone else experiencing this and knows if there is a fix short of filling in the optional epic name? Screenshot 2023-10-24 at 16.15.05.png

Justin Liu November 26, 2023

the Issue Colour for Epic is not displayed on the Dashboard ? 

when using the Parent field, all the nice background colour for Eipc is gone

 

jira.png

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Justin Liu November 26, 2023

the Issue Colour for Epic is not displayed on the Dashboard ? 

when using the Parent field, all the nice background colour for Eipc is gone

 

jira.png

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Mark Thompson November 29, 2023

Question - This seems to have rolled out to me.  FYI for others - automation rules look like they need to be manually updated.  

When is Atlassian going to allow deleting the old Epic Link field?  Right now it seems like it will have to be manually removed.  It's a deprecated field so we should be allowed to delete it.

AL November 29, 2023

I'm not crazy about these changes, preferring to keep the distinction between parent issues and epics.  If anything I would instead like to be able to see the epic that a subtask's parent belongs to (in addition to that parent)!

But, taking the changes as a given, my issue is that the color-coding and wrapping of the epic names has been lost when searching issues.search results.png

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Brian Handscomb November 30, 2023

IMHO these changes have negatively influenced the usefulness of JIRA, one of the most notorious being epics previously marked as done have resurrected themselves and admittedly not a JIRA expert have been unable to find a way now of working out what epics were marked as done. A complete mess for established users.

The usage of the description field as a name when there was already a name field made a whole bunch of epics meaningless in my case as people has put "tasks related to this project" or similar in multiple description but at least the name field was still there and could be copied/pasted to "fix" the mess created. Displaying them in all caps reduced the amount of the name displayed in places where it is most important and is also a legibility issue.

I'm somewhat "stuck" with having to use JIRA at least once every other week but day to day I've reverted back to pen and paper and crossing off tasks so that I can avoid the system as much as possible.

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Joffrie De Winter
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January 12, 2024

I welcome all changes, except for the Epic name -> Issue Summary switch. This is simply not helping anyone. We just switched to the cloud version and now have to work with 1 field to search for epics as well as display them on the issues cards on the board. These two usecases do not always require the same field. Our cards are now not readable at first sight anymore with a simple Epic Name. We cannot keep it simple anymore because then we cannot do a detailed search for it since most fields in Jira are not searchable besides exporting things to excel. Please at least give us the option to choose what we display on an issue card. Thanks.

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