@Délia DRAOUI Hi Délia, I have raised a ticket with Atlassian support about the roll out of this feature. The answer I received was "Currently, we do not have an ETA on when this will be live in all instances."
So the date of the March 22nd appears to be more of a 'start date' and the change will appear on our sites at some point. It's a shame that it's so vague and it would be great if a member of Atlassian could confirm whether this is the case.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
March 28, 2023 edited
Hi everyone! Thanks for your patience with this release, I just want to answer some frequently asked questions:
When is the Epic name/color/status change going out?
We had planned to start this roll out on March 22, however we found some bugs that we held up the release to fix. We will start rolling out the switch for Epic name and Epic color later this week. This will be a progressive roll out, so you may see the change on your Jira instance any time over the next few weeks. The roll out for Epic status to issue status will begin a little later, likely in a week or two.
What is being released in March?
In the next few weeks, only the change from Epic name -> Issue summary, Epic color -> Issue color and Epic status -> Issue Status. The change from Epic Link to Parent will come later, and is not part of this release. You can follow this blog for updates on the change from Epic link to Parent.
Are we expecting any changes to what shows in the Epic Link field in child issues? Currently, the Epic Name displays by default in this field.
Yes, the text in the Epic Link field currently displays the Epic name, and will switch to using the Issue Summary instead.
Is there a JQL query I could run to see if there are any Epic's where the Epic Name value is not the same as the issue summary?
Unfortunately we don't have a JQL query that can give this information - sorry about that.
On a related note, we do have a couple of queries that can tell you if there are any Epics that have a different Epic status to their Issue status. You can then use Jira's bulk change functionality to update these statuses to match. This will preserve the behaviour of the Epic panel, which uses the Epic status to decide what Epics show up. We'll be publishing some documentation on this one soon, but in the mean time you can use these:
How about those who are migrating from Server/DC to Cloud?
How will you handle the epic fields before and after the roll-out date?
Will the epic fields be automatically changed to the rolled-out ones when it is migrated to cloud?
Yes - this change will happen automatically. We are not removing the epic fields from Jira, but rather switching what shows up in the UI to other fields. For example, where you saw the Epic lozenge display Epic name before, you will see Issue summary.
Thanks again for your patience, we're really excited to be finally bringing these changes out.
For any specific questions about your instance, please contact support.
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Thanks @Kate West-Walker - this is a real helpful comment. I am still excited and a little scared to see what this roll out will affect on our instance. We have some automation, filters, JQL, REST API and more work that we do relating to Epics and am overall happy this is coming to fruition ... just have been waiting a while. Thank you
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Yes, thanks @Kate West-Walker . I was confused about the timing too. I had some issues with Epic/Story linkage this week and put in a support case thinking that these changes were the cause, I went as far as hiding Epic Link and asking users to populate Parent Link as well, but that wasn't correct :-(
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Thanks for the info. Can you also answer my question from earlier about whether the agile APIs will also return the new information?
I assume also the APIs related to epics will be changed as well. For example, we use the APIs
/rest/agile/1.0/board/{boardId}/epic?done=true and
/rest/agile/1.0/board/{boardId}/epic?done=false, I assume they will start returning the epics based on the Issue Status Category now (instead of Epic Status) and we can rely on that.
I can confirm that the two APIs described above will behave as you've described once the changes are fully rolled out - they will return the epics based on the issue status category instead of Epic Status as will be consistent with the Jira UI.
Totally surprised by this change (we only migrated to the cloud 2 months ago) and now do have multiple complains from our Jira users, because the specifically do use epic name and epic summary on a different way. What is the best way to prefent missing this kind of updates/ beinginformed timely and/or being able to provide stakeholder input at the start?
@Joris there are community articles like this one. The primary way is following the Jira Cloud Roadmap (Google it for the URL). If you have Jira Premium you can set your release track to Bundled and set a sandbox to Continuous then you can test new releases before they reach production.
Thanks for the reply. Just made the changes in the admin panel ;) What would be the best way to get notifications about this upcomming changes? What is your experience/work around? Thanks again.
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This is just one perspective, but I have been administering Jira almost since release (2005?). While having a short Epic Name and a separate Epic Status seems useful, they have caused a huge number of problems for my users over the years and I'm glad they're going away. For example:
Cloning epics results in a new ticket with the old Epic Name,
Teams that use the basic Summary and Status never understand why there are other "secret" fields that basically do the same thing.
A JQL of any large Jira instance for issues where Epic Status and Status have become mismatched will show tons of problems.
I'm pretty sure this is all a holdover from when the agile features were a plugin called Greenhopper, later bought by Atlassian but never fully cleaned up and integrated until now. Long overdue and a great move.
For Summary, I suggest using a short name there, which is better for list views anyway, What I do is (example):
Summary: Centralized reporting for 3rd party vulnerabilities
Description: As a member of the InfoSec team, I want to see the number and severity of CVEs across all company products so that I can work with development teams to improve our security stance. (etc)
Does the Roadmap view show the Epic Name or the Issue Summary? I've changed the field on my roadmap and it doesn't change dropdowns anywhere else. Why have an Epic Name if it's not going to be consistently used across Jira?
> Why have an Epic Name if it's not going to be consistently used across Jira?
That's exactly why the change is being made. To phase out the use of Epic Name in favour of Summary. A positive change in my opinion as it's currently a real pain. Most of the Jira projects we have use automation to keep Epic Name and Summary aligned. The rest have issues most months about confusion when the values differ.
I am still getting started and would like to know more about using Jira. I see it's a powerful tool to have, my organisation is still small but we are growing, so looking forward to see the strengths of Jira.
With all due respect: this is absolute garbage. We're now getting extremely long descriptions shown in our cards when all we want is a simple name like what we've always had... Our entire team is flabbergasted as to why anyone would want this instead.
@Bruno Blanco, @bmccarthy I do agree to some extend, although I wouldn't call it "absolute garbage". I read previous comments and the reasons for this change and understand they were made to make Jira easier and more consistent.
However, long epic summaries are not practical anymore as they show on issues and are abbreviated in the backlog view. This makes it important to put the most descriptive text in the first 16 characters of the epic summary (effectively making it the epic name :-)).
It's easy enough to make this work by using short epic summaries. The only change I really don't like is that the text in the epic labels (on issues and in the backlog view) are in all capitals which is quite 'shouty' and -for me- doesn't add value and reduced clarity. @Rohan Swami I hope this bit can be reverted.
Are there changes again? Since today the backlog epic 'label' is showing the epic name again instead of epic summary. We are getting confused overhere.
Did Atlassian really do an Epic Color update without adding Custom Colors? It's been requested since 2017 and Atlassian has ignored customers now for half a decade.
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Can we get an update on Dates for this. I have been telling our Jira Users this is coming for a couple of months now, and I'm looking foolish. If you going to delay a rollout after sending an email with a date you need to send another email so we aren't just sitting here waiting and can't provide an accurate update.
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