what is pros and cons of deleting issues in jira?

[salome gogolauri]

Hello, I have question about deleting issues.
what are pros and cons of deleting issues in jira? Could deleting a task that doesn't contain any data do anything bad?

thank you in advance!

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @salome gogolauri -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

In addition to the other ideas suggested...in my experience, a good reason to disable the delete permission for all users except org / site admins is to save time, reduce chaos, and protect enterprise assets.

Large amounts of time can be wasted debating with users claiming "we are agile and can do what we want...we're self-managing..." and then trying to support them when they delete valuable information with no immediate restore capability. 

This can be an education issue, as they may not understand the backup / restore capabilities of Jira Cloud, without marketplace addons.  They may not understand the enterprise compliance and security issues of deleting information for traceability of feature development.  They may not grasp the value of the information stored.  It may also be an invulnerability perspective: we never make mistakes, and so would only delete things when needed.  (Until someone makes a mistake...)

I am speaking from personal experience, where at a prior role this became a "big dang deal", leading to an inconsistent outcome. (sigh)

Kind regards,
Bill

[Matt Parks · Accepted solution]

In our Jira instance, only Jira admins (and there are only three of us) have the ability to delete issues. Sometimes, it makes sense to delete because you might be looking at metrics that actually include canceled stories and you don't want these to show up. But never let normal users delete issues since, as others have mentioned here, once that happens, they are gone.

[Rilwan Ahmed · Accepted solution]

Hi @salome gogolauri ,

Welcome to the community !!

Cons: Once a ticket is deleted, you can never restore it.
In future, when you run a report, you might not get all list of issues. Deleted tickets will be missed from the report and you may not remember it is deleted and end wasting time searching for those issues.

If you are in jira data center hosting, you can archive issues instead of deleting. 

[Craig Nodwell · Accepted solution]

Hi @salome gogolauri welcome to the community.  I see no Pro's in delete's and discourage the activity.  DC allows Archiving.  And most if not all workflows have a Cancel resolution(step in workflow) to reflect anything that was created and not actually needed.  Filtering these out of reports is easily performed based on resolution value.

[Sagar · Accepted solution]

Hi @salome gogolauri Welcome to the Atlassian Community.

The pros for deleting the issues in Jira are namely as follows :

• Your instance and database will have a clean data by removing unnecessary issues.
• Performance of the Jira can improve by reducing the database size and JQL search query (This can be achieve by arching the issues as well).

Some of major cause are as follow :

• Deleting the issues will permanently remove all associated data of that issues like comments, attachments, etc
• If there are any dependencies that deleted issue is having with another issues then it will break as well.
• This change can't be undo.

Thanks

Sagar

[salome gogolauri]

Hello, thank you for you answer.
I agree, but if you create an issue and the issue contains no data - only a title and description that is no longer relevant and has no value to the content of the project, the developers have not even worked on this task, how about deleting such an issue?

We will change the title and content of such an issue and convert it into another issue so that there are no missing numbers in the numbering of the issues. Do these task numbers matter at all, except, for example, to use them for searching?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, they do not matter.  Your searches and reporting won't be affected by a missing issue number.

A good reason for issue delete is indeed "we accidentally raised an issue with no useful data", but these are a tiny fraction of the number of issues that people raise and then try to delete later.  Given Jira's simple "delete means delete", you are far better off preventing deletion of the other 99.9% of issues that should not be deleted in error.

[Sathish Kumar Golla · Accepted solution]

Deleting something in jira you should not do and need to forgot about deleting anytype of activity if you delete any thing in jira it will be in Database.

If it is a issue deletion instead of deletion just mark it as closed choosing any required reslotuin

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

The only "pro" is that it can make your data easier to understand.

Some people will say stuff about privacy and security, but if you've created the issue, it's too late to be worrying about that.

I strongly recommend that you disallow delete for anyone other than an expert user, someone who can be relied on to vet whether an issue should be deleted.

Then either set up a system for delete (I've done "trash project", "scripted issue level security", and "admin request" type schemes a lot in the past) or consider getting one of the "recover deleted issues" apps from the marketplace (noting that they can only recover deleted issues from the time that they are installed)

[salome gogolauri]

Thank you for your answer!