How to mark "big" new features (issues) in JIRA?

[Borek Bernard]

This is a workflow / project configuration question.

We track a software project in JIRA which has a release every 1-2 months and in every release, there are a couple of main new features (most notable changes). We use relatively flat structure where all tickets are on the same level, some have higher priorities than others but generally, there are no deep hierarchies. We use the "Kanban" agile boards.

I'd like to somehow mark certain issues as the "main" issues of that release. It's not about priority - for example some small bug may have severe priority but still be relatively unimportant to most end users. So I need another field that would somehow denote the significance of a feature for a given release. Ideally, when JIRA exports release notes, it would take this "significance" field into account and put the most significant new features on top.

Do I need to create my own field or can some built-in field be used for that? There is an epic/theme field but as far as I understand, it doesn't really suit our flat ticket structure. Is there anything else I could use?

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Accepted solution]

Just use a custom field. How do you want to mark it as significant? Is it just an 'Yes' or 'No' or do you need a level for significance (similar to Priority field)? Depending on that, you can use a select list of radio button.