I’m trying to prepare the user community for change and I can’t give them a date. Then uncertainty breeds mistrust. We’ve also done a big cleanup so I don’t want to have to do it again in a months time.
The status stuff seems good, the colour palette stuff seems unnecessary but harmless, but for the life of me I can't figure out why on earth anyone would want the entire epic summary cluttering up the board? What was wrong with showing the name?
It's such a headache for me to now go and move the summary into the description, and then the name into the summary, for every epic, so that our boards become legible again.
For new epics, people are naturally still going to enter a short name in the "Name" field, and then an informative summary in the "Summary" field, and it's going to clutter the board up and I'm going to have to then go and manually move their summary into description and their name into summary once again :(
I really don't understand why there's so much glowing feedback here.
I also don't understand why the epics had to change because now I have to go edit all my Summaries and put them in the description, I don't understand why I have to go and edit all my epics again. Just time westing and who thought of this update.
Thumbs up for @Dirk Maij - I had exactly the same thought. At our company, we have been working successfully in multiple development teams using both epic names and epic summaries. For us, it is a real bummer that we are now seeing the longer epic summaries instead of the names in our boards. This would mean huge re-work and inconsistency between old and new epics.
A configurable option would be a good solution here. Thanks!
This feels like a poorly thought through change. Rather than presenting individual tasks within epics that are meant to encompass larger multi-faceted projects by their one or two word titles, we now have wordy, often outdated descriptions as colored tags cluttering our sprint tasks. Don't even get me started on if a task has multiple epics attached to it.
This should have been an option for those that wanted to see it, not a complete changeover for every user. Please allow US to choose how we want to handle our task management with your tool, not the other way around.
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People who use Summary for the epic name, like mine, and have always found Epic Name to be a duplication left over from the GreenHopper days (original maker of the agile stuff).
People who use Epic Name for the short name and put a lot more in the Summary.
Would be nice for Atlassian to provide a simple migration option or automation/script template to help group #2.
For the people who don't understand the glowing reviews, I think those are coming from group #1. For example, here are some real Summary values for our Epics:
The 'short' summaries you list John Price are way too long to use as epic names in my opinion. Names would be things like "Workflow", or "CLI API". They only really need to be meaningful for the duration of a release.
Sure, @John Price , but that's in your case. We use the short name as labels to quickly see which issues have preference when working on tickets in the same epic.
Hence to avoid the mess created with this change, we remove all epic reference on the cards and start looking for alternative software.
A problem with making things configurable is that now that we're being forced to move to the cloud (a decision as an organisation, but Atlassian seems to be pushing this), we have one instance across the entire organisation, rather than lots of individual on-prem instances. Some teams have incompatible configuration requirements with each other. Any options need to be per project, rather than per instance.
Completely agree with @John Price earlier comment and with dropping 'Epic Name' in favour of 'Summary', we have long been been keeping both fields in sync using Jira automation and this is fairly simple to setup.
For those of you who've been writing long summaries and short epic names, now is your time to consolidate these. Both fields essentially exist for more or less the purpose of storing a short title of the epic, and I don't think we need 2 epic titles. If the name field were truly necessary then we'd see it on Stories, Tasks and Initiatives, but we don't because it's just a carry over from an old system. In my experience when users are faced with both these fields on the create form, more often than not they will put the same text in both fields anyway. There are only some experienced users who truly understand the difference and know how epic name can be used differently to summary, but it's simpler all round if we just use short summaries, I think. One of the beauties of Jira in my view is it's consistency in the use of fields across multiple issue types, all field names prefixed with 'Epic' essentially break that principle because they apply only to epics, I appreciate that there will always be some type specific fields like 'Affects versions' for bugs mainly, but fields like name, color, link, status should not be type specific and if you take a way the epic prefix from those, it then becomes apparent they are duplicates of summary, issue color, parent and status. You don't see other fields like Bug Name or Bug Colour etc, so why should Epic be any different. Anyway that's just my view, hope that helps in some way.
@John Price@Ivan Shtanichev As being a user from group #2 I totally miss the Epic Name and have to make the summary really short. The Summary needs to be short because its also shown as a label in the backlog where its text is truncated to ~16 characters. So to make this work best you'll need to keep the summary very short.
I have manually copied the epic names to the summary as part of our migration. We have about 200 epics. Export/import didn't really work because I wanted to keep the original summary in the description.
@Dirk Maij I share your frustration, but your solution seems quite drastic - unless you have 1000s of epics.
I hope there will be a 'label' field again in the future, so a summary can hold a short summary of the epic and the label can be used to quickly identify the epic issues belong to.
Hi @Alex Hoogendoorn, thanks for your feedback. Regarding epic label in the backlog, from what I can tell it's truncated to 23 characters, however if you mouseover the label, it does actually show the full title of the epic.
You have to be kidding. I literally spent this weekend cleaning up all my epics to have short names to reduce clutter and better autocomplete, and long descriptive summaries to explain what was supposed to be in them. I was going to present this to my manager and the team today.
I am confused about the changes to the visibility of Epics in the Epics panel. I am still seeing Epics that are marked as DONE. I can also confirm that all child issues are also marked DONE.
Based on the release notes this Epic should automatically be hidden from the epics panel.
Hey all, we really need an update on what is being pushed here and what is not and what the timeline is, I am very confused, and still having the issue of required epic names.
@Darrel Jackson sounds like multiple releases were summarized in a single release note page then? Just a bit confusing to show me a pop-up summarizing new functionality if I have yet to receive all of the mentioned updates, that's all.
PS: the UPPERCASE epic names in the backlog is distracting, feels like everything is yelling at me!
This is only taking effect today in our Jira instance...
In any case, regarding the Epic's Name vs. Summary, I'd rather have the option to choose which field to display on the board or in the back log -- not have to swallow what Atlassian decided (for whatever good reason they had).
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