How to reorganise epics in JIRA?

[Sasha Abramovich]

Suppose I have a legacy board with 30 epics and I certainly recognise that there are no more than 5 lanes the team is working on. What I'd like to do is:

1. To preserve the epic assignment for the currently completed stories, so no historical data will be lost
2. To open 3 new epics and to reassign all the non-completed stories to these epics
3. To preserve 2 of the existing epics and all the associated stories

How can I do it in JIRA? Am I resolving the issue with the best approach?

[Steven F Behnke]

• You could set the board's Swimlanes option to Queries and manually set the swimlanes to your five Epics.
• You could set the Epic's field Epic Status which should remove them from the active Swimlanes.

Moving issues from one Epic to another can be done easily – Writing a query for those issues and then using Bulk Edit you can change the Epic Link field to your Epic of choice.