Our "Epic Status" field configuration has somehow been modified and breaks stuff. How can I revert?

[Orrin Ward]

Recently some people in my team found that their Epic panels in their backlog views were filled with all their Epics, including old ones which were removed by "Mark as Done".

Upon investigation, the "Epic Status" values for the issues is as I'd expect; Done.

When I looked at the configuration for the Epic Status field, it appears that the configuration has been changed from the default set of To Do / In Progress / Done and now includes a number of other statuses.

I attempted to revert the change but the field is locked by the software. I'm curious to find out how I can revert it and also what caused the change - Changes to the field were not logged in the Audit Log so I'm not able to find out how this occurred. And even as a Site Admin, I am unable to edit the configuration.

We're on Jira Premium, and make use of Jira Product Discovery and Jira Plans

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Orrin,

No, you will not be able to edit Locked fields. I remember reading that Atlassian is moving away from Epic Status and will just be using the regular Status field for Epics. This will happen around the same time as moving from Epic Link to Parent. 

So, I would check the Status field for all of your Epics to see if they line up with the current values of the Epic Status field. 

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi, John! 

Do you recall where you saw that Epic Status will be deprecated?  I just checked the posts in developer community for the "Epic Link to Parent changes" and did not see that...although it makes sense.  The REST API documentation now shows that field as "internal -- do not use".

Thanks,
Bill

[John Funk]

Hey Bill!

It was this one:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-articles/Upcoming-changes-to-epic-fields-in-company-managed-projects/ba-p/1997562

[Orrin Ward]

Hey John, thanks for this.

I'm actually trying to figure out how the Epic status configuration has been changed so I could revert it.

It has changed already in the last month and messed up a lot of stuff for our teams, but there is no audit of that.

Those capitalised options in my screenshot are totally new, and I can't seem to revert the changes, how they were actioned, and who did it.

My suspicion is that as part of the changes to how Epics work generally, there might be a bug that has somehow allowed this to happen - Those new values look suspiciously like what someone might want their workflow to look like for an Epic - I'd initially assumed that an admin had mistakenly edited the "Epic status" field instead of adding statuses to a workflow for their Epics, but I could not reproduce that theory as the Epic status field is locked.

[John Funk]

I would go ahead and open a support ticket with Atlassian and ask them what happened. Please post the resolution or response back here so we can close this out for future readers. Good luck!

https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/

[Orrin Ward]

Thanks again John, I misunderstood and thought this was the support place! I've opened a ticket and will report back.

[Orrin Ward]

I forgot to report back.

The issue was that someone had imported from a Spreadsheet and mapped their Status field to "Epic Status". Jira blindly imports those values as new entries, so the bulk import added a bunch of new values, breaking our instance.

Atlassian temporarily unlocked the Epic Status field so I could migrate the erroneous issues and then delete the configuration, reverting to the original set.

[John Funk]

Thanks for letting us know!