Thank you for the update. I have a question and a comment/question.
Could you give an update on when these changes are being rolled out, please? It seems like they haven't been released yet.
I don't grasp the rationale about using the epic summary instead of the epic name. To me they seem two different things. Could you please elaborate on this?
The summary being a descriptive text about what the epic is about.
The name being a short readable text to quickly identify the epic.
I would be very happy if the change from Epic name to Epic Summary is NOT released :-).
I don't grasp the rationale about using the epic summary instead of the epic name. To me they seem two different things. Could you please elaborate on this?
The summary being a descriptive text about what the epic is about.
The name being a short readable text to quickly identify the epic.
I may have this wrong but my understanding is Epic Name field is being decommissioned in favour of Summary field. Summary field is more reliable as it is used in more places in the UI for all issues whereas Epic Name issued only in the board UI's and only used for Epic issue types. Many Jira instances (ours included) have convention and/or automation where the Epic Name is always set to the Summary anyway. So I see this as a sensible simplification/clean-up.
Maybe Summary is being confused with Description? Summary is a short readable text to quickly identify the epic. Description is descriptive text about what the epic is about.
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Alex Hoogendoorn I agree with you that it's nice to have a "short name" for your epics. However I am in favor of this change because that nice-to-have is way offset by overhead of needing to add the field in places, explain the difference to users, etc.
Good News, I am looking forward to the day when Epic Name disappears forever, and Summary is used instead. On Jira server I set all workflows to sync Summary to Epic Name, and it has saved me from sooo many support questions. People simply do not see the value in a second name for the same thing.
We are moving to Jira Cloud now, and I find it rather annoying that you can't copy Summary to Epic Name on Create. No one in my company wants to use Epic Name and I am working on hiding it again in Jira Cloud, so nice to see that it will appear in fewer places in the standard views!
So we're losing the ability to have a nice short name that appears on the boards, but a longer more meaningful name when the epic is opened? Having a distinction between the two was always a really nice feature for us.
This may not be popular but can you remove the 19 character limit on the Summary and make it 255 characters? That way it is optional for your customers how they populate that field.
We keep epic name and summary the same, as it goes, and have an average of 46 characters that mean a great deal to the work we do! If we lose the display of Epic Name, then we have a truncated Summary. Am I missing something?
Very welcome - users often ended up confused between Epic name and summary, so this makes more sense. It's be nice if the JQL for searching for issues in an Epic could be brought in line between team-managed and company-managed projects - often catches people out and seems a bit unnecessary to have them different.
@Samuel Penn - You are not losing that ability - that's what the Summary field has always been intended to be. Having both a mandatory at create Summary field and Epic Name field really makes no sense. It just brings Epics in line with all other issue types in Jira for clarity. I wish this thing was rolled out yesterday!
@John Funk Which one has the summary meant to be? The Epic name is a one (or two) word label. Summary field is a sentence. Description is multiple paragraphs. The distinctions always made perfect sense to me, and was a really nice feature. But it seems lots of people found it confusing.
Epics are also different to other issue types because they are used as labels on both the active board and the backlog (so need to be limited to one or two words). Stories/bugs don't get used in that way, so don't have the same limitation. We'll now have summaries being treated differently depending on the issue type.
But I seem to be massively 'outvoted', so not much point discussing further.
Labels are used for one or two word labels. Curious where you got that definition of Epic Name - that might just be something local that has been decided how you are implementing that. My point is that is just seems useless or redundant to me. And it's mandatory which makes it a stumbling block. If it wasn't required, I wouldn't really care if it was there or not. Anyway, onward and upward. :-)
Is there any way to sign up to be earlier in the rollout, rather than waiting until the end of March? We have a newish instance and I'd love to move more quickly so our users don't create many things using the "old" values :)
I agree with @Samuel Penn We like a longer descriptive summary for when you open epic. And, more importantly, for Jira Advanced Roadmaps. But... like a shorter, crisper name for the Boards (backlog and active sprint).
A short Epic name/summary will not work great for roadmaps.
A long Epic name/summary will not work great for boards.
Hi everyone, one question regarding the upcoming change that the name of the epic on the board and backlog will now use the epic’s issue summary.
If we still use epic name field on the epic, does this affect automation rules using the epic name smart value? Like in this lookup issues action to lookup all stories linked to an epic: "Epic Link" = "{{issue.Epic Name}}".
I tried to query the Epic Summary instead, but this wasn't successful: "Epic Link" = "{{issue.Epic.Summary}}"
@katharina.rott - My understanding is that they will try to update your rule for you automatically when this rolls out to switch out the Summary for the Epic Name in your automation. But they also have given the caveat of that might not actually happen.
And it won't look like issue.Epic.Summary. It will just be {{issue.summary}} like it is now. And value for "Epic Link" is an issue key not text which is what Summary and Epic Name are. So it would be more like "Epic Link" = {{issue.key}} or more likely "Epic Link" = {{triggerIssue.key}} depending on what your rule is actually doing.
@John Funk thanks for your fast reply and explanation! Just tried the automation rule with "Epic Link" = "{{issue.key}}" instead of "Epic Link" = "{{issue.Epic Name}}" which worked perfectly!
When will be able to order child issues in an epic not through priority or added etc but actually number them from most to least important as some things maybe the same priority but completed in different order.
@bmccarthy, @Samuel Penn, I'm with you here. We use the Epic summary and name in the same way. I see them as two different pieces of information which are both used in different ways and for different purposes.
@John Funk I understand this feature makes epics different to other issue types and that aligning different issue types with each other is beneficial. However the epic name will be greatly missed.
Do you have any ideas how to easily adapt out epics to the new situation. What we need to do is:
Move the summary to the epic description (as we don't want to loose it), and
Move the epic name to the epic summary.
Unfortunately it will be quite a bit of work, but we'll get there.
@Alex Hoogendoorn You should be able to create an automation rule to do that for you.
I would actually create a new custom field called Epic Summary or something like that - but not Summary which would cause confusion. The field should be a Short Text field.
Then Create a Scheduled trigger to run once a day. Add the JQL for just a single Epic to test it - something like Key = ABC-123 is the Epic.
Add a new action for Edit issue. Select the new custom field.
Then click the Copy from option beside the field and choose Epic Summary from the list of fields to copy from.
Then add a Re-fetch Issue action just to be sure.
Finally add another new action for Edit issue, but this time select the Summary field and copy the value from the Epic Name field. (including a screenshot of this one step).
Same and publish it. Then click the Run rule button. If all looks good, then you can change the JQL associated with the Scheduled first step to something like Project = ABC and issuetype - Epic
I would do it for a few projects at a time instead of all Epics, depending on the number of Epics you have.
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