Upcoming changes to epic fields in company-managed projects

228 comments

Karen Waters
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May 10, 2023

I don't understand why epic summaries are being used in Jira as labels in the backlog and the sprint boards.  The epic names we chose were short and very clear as to what the group of stories was about and could be read clearly when viewing the backlog or sprint board.  We used the longer epic summary field for text such as the full description of a change request or system requirement.  These longer summaries are not useful at all for displaying in the backlog and on sprint boards.  Please revert this change and go back to having epic names and summaries and using the shorter epic name as a label for stories in the backlog and sprint boards.

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Kerrie
Contributor
May 10, 2023

It is extremely disappointing that you forced the change of Epic Name to Epic Summary on all of us. You could have at least included a configuration option so that we could set the name as the labels in boards if we so desire. 

I would rather you spend some time on the bugs that I have to work around on a daily basis!

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Tony Bordsen
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May 10, 2023

I am not very happy with this change in regard to how it impacted the setup we had. You changed the name of my epics unilaterally. For instance, I had an epic named "Maintenance". It fit nicely into the display area and easily understood. You renamed the epic to: "This epic represents any brand specific work as well as any production support and operations work". ????? What a ridiculous overreach of configuration administration. 

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Dane Kantner
Contributor
May 10, 2023

This change is terrible -- can we have an option to use the epic name instead?

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Gemma.Buckley05
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May 11, 2023

Please change it back to displaying the short name for an epic on the backlog and the epic link on a ticket.  We have nice to display short names there with descriptive summaries when you click on the epic that explains it in full.

Using the short name in the backlog and epic link allows for this to be easily read in the limited space available, showing the long epic summary here is useless as the business needs to see full words here and not shortened words or acronyms.

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Mark_Pollard06
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May 11, 2023

Please change this back.

As with all the other comments above, it makes no sense to use the longer summary titles in the limited space label etc.

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Adam Abrahams
Contributor
May 11, 2023

Is there any update on this? I thought that this would have been launched by now?

Sandra Axelsdottir
Community Leader
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May 17, 2023

Great changes and I agree with Bogdan's comment above. 

This can be easily updated via automation rules. For safety I created 2 rules:

  1. First rule updates the description by adding the current summary at the top of the description:
    {{issue.summary}}
    {{issue.description}}
  2. Second rule updates the Summary by replacing current summary with Epic name

Cheers,

Sandra

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Layo
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May 22, 2023

Does anyone know if it is possible to configure what value (either Issue summary or Epic Link Name) the value that displays on Cards in the backlog or sprint board (I believe what is called "lozenge"). While this change makes sense, it definitely ruins what my team has been doing for year in JIRA, with no option to control this from Project Settings.

cc @Rohan Swami1 not sure if you have any insight to this as you wrote this article!

Sandra Axelsdottir
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May 22, 2023

@Layo you can very easily update all your issues and make epic name become your issue summary. See my comment above yours. My method should fix your issues. I had the same happen for me and by applying those rules it resolved itself and users were really happy not having to use Epic link name anymore :) 

Kerrie
Contributor
May 22, 2023

@Layo No, it is not possible to configure the value that is used. Some of us are very disappointed that this change has been forced upon us with no choice and no customisation options. 
So the only thing you can do is rename all of your Epics so that the Summary is no longer a summary but rather a short name (Personally I don't believe that setting up a rule to move summary to description and name to summary is an acceptable option. Users should have been given a choice, simple as that) 

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Yvonne May 23, 2023

Hi everyone,

it was planned to roll out the changes in March 2023 but this is not yet the case, right? 

Best

Darrel Jackson
Contributor
May 23, 2023

Based on my experience and the feedback on the thread, this change is currently being rolled out to cloud. If you're on a bundled release track check your bundled release contents as it may be coming soon.

Layo
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May 23, 2023

@Sandra Axelsdottir unfortunately, I've set up alot in jira around using the existing format; at this point swapping the Epic Link/Name for the Summary is like redoing the foundation after the house has been built :/

Does anyone know how to place requests in for jira enhancements? Adding this as an optional config seems like a reasonable compromise and simple fix for Atlassian that aligns with I'm assuming is a aligning of Epics into the "Issues" bucket?

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Yvonne May 23, 2023

Thanks @Darrel Jackson

We are using cloud but so far the changes haven't been rolled out.

Kerrie
Contributor
May 24, 2023

@Layo I think one has already been created here https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPOSERVER-7021 

Maybe everyone who agrees that a configuration option would be a good compromise, could upvote that Enhancement 

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Krzysztof Nosek
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May 24, 2023

So is there going to be a (paid?) extension reverting this new behaviour?  Bah.

Irene
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May 29, 2023

Hi all, we’ve been receiving a few questions about this release, and I wanted to take the opportunity to clarify where we’re at with our rollout:

Release dates for ‘epic name’ and ‘epic color’

  • Some of you have noticed these changes rolling out in your instances, while others have not. I can confirm that these updates began rolling out at the end of March and are expected to be completed by mid-June.

  • This rollout was delayed due to an epic color bug affecting customers who were migrating from Server to Cloud using our Jira Cloud Migration Assistant. We have currently paused this rollout while we fixed this bug, but expect to begin the rollout again very soon.

We have decided to delay the release of our updates to ‘epic status’

As we mentioned previously, the proposed changes to epic status will impact the list of epics appearing on the epic panel in the backlog.

For some customers, this may mean old epics appear, while for others, some epics may disappear. If you have kept both the epic’s Status and Issue status in sync, then you shouldn’t see any changes to the epics in the epic panel.

Due to this impact and the feedback we’ve received, we have decided to provide more time to allow you to prepare for this update and make any necessary changes. The rollout for this change will begin in August 2023.

Learn more about what you can do to prepare for these changes

Update to ‘epic name’

We know that this update has caused confusion, and has meant additional work for many of you.

Unfortunately, as we have already rolled this update out to a large number of customers, we are unable to provide you with the option to choose which fields to retain. We understand this is frustrating, and we apologize for any inconvenience this update has caused.

We can suggest a solution provided by one of our Community Leaders to use Automation rules to make these updates post-rollout. For those who do not have these updates yet, we recommend following the steps provided in our Community post.

I will provide additional updates as our rollout of this work progresses.

Thank you,

Irene

 

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Alessandro Vitale
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May 30, 2023

About "Epic name → Issue summary" my question is easy , WHY ?????

This irreversible change doesn't make any sense for us. This is my dashboard and not Atlassian dashboard then I want to have the full control on what should appear on my Epic. Please provide a fix or a feature flag to revert this horrible behaviour ! Thanks 

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Alex Hoogendoorn
Contributor
May 31, 2023

@Rohan Swami It looks like the Epic Name is still used in Epic progress section of the Insights panel of a sprint. Is this deliberate?

Irene
Atlassian Team
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June 1, 2023

Hi @Alessandro Vitale , we are sorry to hear about the impact it has made on your dashboard. If you haven't, please try the Automation solution linked in my previous message. This should only be run once to update current Epics. Moving forward, please use Epic's Issue summary for new epics. 

Hope that helps. Thanks.

Irene
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
June 1, 2023

@Alex Hoogendoorn thank you for passing that on to us. No that's not deliberate, the update for Epic progress Insights will be coming soon. 

Irene
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
June 4, 2023

@Alex Hoogendoorn Can you please take a look again now, the Epic progress insights should be using the Summary name now. Thanks. 

Alex Hoogendoorn
Contributor
June 5, 2023

Hi @Irene, Thanks for the quick response. I checked the Epic progress insight just now and it still shows the Epic Name. Cheers

j.lis
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June 15, 2023

Totally agree with @Dave Mathijs --> epic names and summary are really confusing. Don't understand why we have the two, and there are inconsistencies in each features when it comes to displaying one or the other. 

The epic names displayed in the list was really usefull to have the epic name in 1 or 2 words. Given it is not even displayed entirely when there is 1 or 2 words, I don't understand why you made these changes because now, the summary is even longer and yet, it won't be displayed entirely...

 

epic summary not totally visible.png

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