Custom fields in Jira scrum project template

[Mehmood Qureshi]

Hi - My company just acquired Jira for requirements management and tracking and there has been a talk in the company regarding custom fields. I am going to use Jira - Scrum project template for my project and want to create few custom fields such as Acceptance Criteria, Definition of Done etc. but there are folks that are against the idea of creating custom fields. Their argument is when the Jira is upgraded to a newer version, the custom fields do not get updated. I would like to know if thats true? Since Jira is highly customizable, I would doubt that I would lose my custom fields when I upgrade the Jira software to the latest version. 

Please clarify! Thanks

[Warren · Accepted solution]

Hi Mehmood

I am fairly sure that there is no problem with custom fields and Jira upgrades. Most companies have 10s or even 100s of custom fields and I've never heard of any problems.

[Gregor Kasmann_Actonic · Accepted solution]

You may face only one issue - Custom field types provided by some add-ons. A lot of addons provides ability to add new custom field types, like calculated fields, filtered fields, etc.
Custom fields, provided by 3rd party addons may be unavailable after JIRA upgrade and you have to update all the add-ons to compatible version.

[Mehmood Qureshi]

Thank you Warren and Gregor!