Can I opt to use Epic Name not Epic Summary

[Kerrie]

Atlassian have done it again - rolled out a stupid update and as far as I can tell there is no way to opt out or choose which Epic field to use in the Epic labels

My team are now confused and spending far too much time trying to find the right Epics 

I can't seem to find any news or information about this and no option to use the shorter Epic Name in labels rather than the longer Epic Summary (seriously where do they get these ideas!) Is there an option or do I have to go and change the Summary of all of my Epics? 

[Mikael Sandberg]

You can read about the change in this article, Upcoming changes to epic fields in company-managed projects and these changes started rolling out in March.

There is no option to select if you want to use epic name or the summary field, since epic name will eventually go away. What you can do is create an automation that copies the epic name to the summary in order to fix it.

[Kerrie]

I did come across that article in my search but given that it is over a year old and last updated 9 months ago it is unclear what applies to this weeks change

I am sorry but we should not have to go to the effort of creating an automation to adjust to a change they have rolled out. I don't see any mention in that article of Epic name being completely removed, in fact it states 'The existing Epic name field will remain available, but will be optional when creating a new epic.'

I would rather see Atlassian deal with the numerous bugs that I have to work around on a daily basis rather than role out these inconvenient unnecessary changes 

[Trudy Claspill]

The roll out was also listed in the weekly release blogs here

https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog/2023/04/atlassian-cloud-changes-mar-27-to-apr-3-2023

[Brett Henderson]

I'm with Kerrie on this one. There are so many work arounds and this seems like a feature no one asked for. I include the Epic on the tickets on the board and instead of a nice simple label, I've a long (truncated) sentence.

To have to go through the process of manually changing all my epics descriptions to the original short name (whether manually or automated) is to be honest a complete waste of my time. If this is the move Atlassian wants to make, then at least give me the option when it was enabled to automatically do the change.

[Per Smith]

I second Karrie and Brett.

Why change something that we have learned to use into something, well, stupid in lack of a better word, without giving us the option to stay with what was actually working for us?

Our boards are now cluttered with abbreviated sentences instead of the short tags we used to have, and I don't even see the old names anywhere to ease the changing back to at least pretend that epics are still the same...

[Brett Henderson]

@Per Smith Only way I could find to identify the old "short" names was to do a search on all epics, then export ALL fields into a CSV. The original "Epic Name" is there under Custom Fields. I then when through all Epic, copied the "Summary" to the ticket "Description" and replaced the "Summary" with the original value of the "Epic Name"

For consideration, in the old view when you expanded the Epic in the Epic pane, you saw the Summary. That way you could easily confirm what it was for. Now there is nothing. but the Summary and of course that's now a short name to ensure the labels on tickets is of value to the team.

[Per Smith]

Thanks for the tip @Brett Henderson 

At least now I can add the old name to the summary

[Danny J Quinn]

This is one of the most stuid things I have ever witnessed in development. Who made the JIRA to change JIRA? I would LOVE to see the community request tickets for this. ROLL IT BACK

[Mikael Sandberg]

@Danny J Quinn There are multiple suggestions to either allow epic name to be synced with summary or make it optional, for example here is one when Jira Software was an app called Greenhopper, JSWCLOUD-8215. 

I for one is glad that this change is finally happening, I have always told my users that they should make the summary and epic name the same and add additional information in the description field.

[Brett Henderson]

I respectively disagree with your original approach Mikael.

In the Backlog interface, when you expand an epic, the "summary" was displayed, allowing a user to easily determine if this was the appropriate epic to either apply or filter on.

Now, to see the Description you have to open the link to the Epic. Sure it's relatively simple to do that but pushes you out of your flow, especially if you don't open it in a new window.

[Wissam Al-Wakeel]

it could have been easily done with a ballon popup when your pointer hover over the epic link in the ticket, instead of this useless change, or at least give users the chance to chose what they want to use here.