What is issue field "Category" on a business project?

[Nicole Howard]

I have created a business project for the management team which can function as a basic todo list. Today they asked me if they could categorise these issues and were trying to use the "Category" issue field which was automatically available on the issue.

The description on Field Configuration is: "Choose a category using a popup picker window."

and it is a locked field.

If you try to enter anything though it tells you "No matches found" and I can't for the life of me figure out how to add categories. Google only tells me about project categories.

Any one know anything about this field?

(I will probably just remove it and let them use labels if I can't figure it out)

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Nicole Howard,

Although very short, this support article explains how you can add, rename and remove categories. You can (currently, I would suspect) only do this in list view and only if you have administrator permissions.

Hope this helps! 

[Sarathi Chatterjee]

This is great if the project is Work Management, can't seem to get this to work in Jira Software.

I was hoping i could treat it like a custom field and contextualize it to a project as needed  - but it is locked.

[Aaryn Bartel]

Do you know why it's locked?  None of the questions or support documents appear to deal with "Jira Software" instances.  They all say "go to list view and edit it there" - which does not work in JIRA Software.  The link above is specific to "Jira Work Management".