How to delete an issue

[Vickie Cobb]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Working with Issues

How to delete an issue??? I have tried unsuccessfully to find the answer to this question? In setting up our Product Backlog, we created some issues that were found to be either duplicates or just plain wrong and would like to be able to delete. I am an administrator on my site, but still cannot find a way to do this?

[Vickie Cobb]

Hi Nic & Joe,

Thanks for your timely responses. I don’t see a delete option in my actions menu. I have asked about this before to our Global Services team and I was told I needed Admin perms, which I have, but I still don’t see it. 

 Please believe that I don’t take the deleting issues lightly, I would be the only person that would delete them.  My team is very new at Jira and we were trying to learn about Jira and put in some bogus issues to try and understand how the software worked.  Now they are a nuisance to continually see in our Product backlog.

 Nic, you indicate that “then this will be because your project permission scheme does not have a rule to select users who can delete.”  Is this something I can change as an Admin?

Thanks for your help.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

As a JIRA Admin, or System Admin, yes, you can edit the permission scheme.  You'll want to add a line to the delete permission, and I'd probably stick to something like "only system admins" (i.e. the group you are in that gives you admin rights)

[Joe Pitt]

I concur with Nic. The forum is full of people desperately wanting to restore an issue. I recommend closing with a special transition only the project lead can execute that automatically makes the resolution DELETED and requires a reason in a custom field named Reason be filled in. It will come back to bite you if you delete issues

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Go to the issue and find "delete" in the actions menu.

If it's not there, then this will be because your project permission scheme does not have a rule to select users who can delete.

Note that a delete is done properly - the issue is gone, completely.  It is strongly recommended that you don't use delete, or if you do allow it, only allow it to a few people, and make it clear to those people that if they do delete an issue, you are NOT going to waste your time recovering it when they get the wrong one.