A new way to bulk update tickets in Jira Software

[#1]

👋 Hi community! 

Over the holiday season we quietly released an exciting new feature to you all - the ability to bulk edit in the backlog. This is a new way to update multiple issues at once right from your backlog. 

What can I do using the bulk edit feature?

From the bulk edit sidebar, you can:

• Search for any additional fields you may want to edit.

• Keep, clear, or edit the fields shared across the selected issues - the options for what you can do to different fields will differ depending on the field type and if the field is required.

If you’d like to read about our new bulk edit feature, you can learn more about how to use the bulk edit feature.

Thats not all!

We’re looking to iterate on this feature already. There are a couple of fields that are still being added, but they’ll be there soon. Stay tuned for even more improvements in this space! 

With this update to your Jira Software backlog, you can stay in context while updating multiple issues at once. Try it out in your project and let us know what you think in the thread below

[Daniel Franz - JXL]

Thanks for the update, this looks great Emily! Looking forward to trying it out.

We at JXL for Jira know that Jira users love editing issues in bulk. Shameless plug: For anyone interested in managing their work like this beyond the backlog and Jira Software, grab a free trial of JXL here. In JXL sheets, you can simply mark, copy and paste fields and other data, making bulk issue updating easier and faster than ever.

JXL is the all-in-one issue editor and organizer that saves you countless clicks and hours. The power of Jira with the simplicity of spreadsheets. Inline-edit issues in highly customizable tables, copy-paste fields individually or in bulk, sum up, rank, group, and structure issues in custom hierarchy, apply conditional formatting rules, surface issue history data such as time in status, and much more. Available for Jira Cloud, Data Center and Server.

[Yatish Madhav]

This is great - thanks @Em Ditchfield  - I know for sure that our Sprint managers are going to find this feature helpful to them! I look forward to more like this ...

Quick question - for this and the other bulk edit from the issue navigator, how can i append or remove from a multi user or multi select field but keep the rest of the items in the field untouched? Eg - I have issues A, B and C ... and each of those issues have a multi select field with random options already selected on them. Now I want to add an addition option selected on top of those already selected or remove an option IF it is selected on them?

Is this possible through the bulk edits in any way?

[Hrithik J]

I have used it today and it is really great feature !! 

Thanks Atlassian !!

[Kelly Lillis]

YAY!!!!

[Em Ditchfield]

@Yatish Madhav Thanks for your question! At the moment this is only possible for labels, components and multi version fields. If you're keen to see this extended to custom fields there is a JAC ticket currently open here tracking interest in the ability. 

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks @Em Ditchfield I have up-voted, watched and commented on that ticket ...

[Apryl Harris]

I don't see this feature in my backlog. Has it rolled out to all Cloud instances? When do you anticipate it will be rolled out to all Cloud instances?

[Bernd Anderer]

This does look pretty good :-)

One question about Bulk Change though - why is it, that I can not Bulk edit „Resolution“?

This would be very helpful …

[Em Ditchfield]

Hi Bernd, glad you like the feature!

Resolutions are set as part of an issues status change and workflow, and therefore can’t be edited in the bulk edit flow. You can instead use bulk transition, which is available on the backlog from “Bulk change” in the contextual menu (the right click menu). You will need to set up a post-function for your transitions. You can read more about how to do this here.

[Bo Zhao]

Looks pretty cool, can't wait to try it out!

[Em Ditchfield]

Hi Apryl! We've recently rolled out to our release track users, so this feature should be available to you. However, your site admin is also able to control access to bulk change capabilities. If you still don't have the feature available I'd suggest investigating if this is the case. You can read more about this global permission setting here.

[Bernd Anderer]

Hi @Em Ditchfield ,

thank you for your explanation. Technically I understand that. 

While, as an Admin, I don't like it :-)

This is a very painful procedure for updating such an important attribute.

In case you are having an empty backlog .... that would be something to consider 😅

[Michael Evangelista]

I thought I didn't have the feature, until I realized you have to _hover_ to show the checkboxes to left of the Issue ID in the backlog. Then you can select one or more of them, and then, the bulk edit is available. Very slick (though maybe not entirely intuitive) now that I can see it. Thank you @Em Ditchfield and Atlassian.

[Summer Hogan]

Thank you @Em Ditchfield! I'm already loving this feature! 

[stuart]

Really nice feature. Now, how do I restrict usage?

[Em Ditchfield]

Hi @stuart! You can restrict it's usage by changing the global permissions, you can read more about how to do this here.

[Rama Krishna]

this is cool....

[Bharat Kalia]

Hello @Em Ditchfield , Users who doesn't have admin access on a project are hitting this error below. The strange thing is they are able to edit the issues independently  and also edit it from the original bulk edit option. I wonder if something was changed?

Thanks,

[Sas Nelson]

Is there any way to create a rule/role/restriction to limit users to bulk editing only a single issue type? In our environment, we would like to allow Test Leads to bulk edit issues that are of the type Test Case, but for someone else, the desire could be to limit bulk edits on Epics, Stories, or any other single type.