How do I move work logs from one issue to another in the same project?

[Benjamin Ashpole]

Jira is aweful... but ONE thing could make it at least managable: moving worklogs to different issues. Is there a way to move work logs from one issue to another in the same project? I tried ictime, but the supposed feature doesn't appear where the documentation says it should appear.

[Jobin Kuruvilla [Adaptavist] · Accepted solution]

I have done it with Tempo. Never tried ictume and so not sure.

[Benjamin Ashpole]

Thanks! Tempo worked great.

[William Maughan]

Jobin we have been using tempo as well but have not found an easy way to move worklogs from one issue to another.

Can you explain how you do this.

thanks,

- Bill

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Aweful? I assume you mean awesome?

Worklogs generally can't be moved because there's an assumption that your users are going to do it in the right place, and delete/re-add is not too onerous if they only make the occaisional mistake (frankly, if your users keep getting it that badly wrong, then having to correct it the hard way is good encouragement for them to get it right the first time!)

[Benjamin Ashpole]

You should never assume that users are going to put worklogs in the right place, and there are times when things have to be shifted even when the users do enter their time correctly. Tempo did what we need, but this ought to be a standard Jira feature.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I agree, that's why you've got delete and re-add.

You should never assume that "entering garbage and (often failing bother) correcting it later" is the right thing to do, and not bothering to implement an easy way to do it is a good way to encourage people to get it right in the first place. I've worked at places where data similar to time-logs was very important, and in one very critical case, we had a specific requirement to make it a pain - it increased initial correct entry by around a third, leading to less admin work, better forecasting, and happier users (because the managers had less to complain about)

[Luke Browell]

Use Case: Moving time logged from a parent to a sub-task retrospectively gaining detail. E.g. A colleague and I started work on a ticket together but subsequently decided to sub-task the work by the specific areas which we had been concentrating on. This is not an anti-pattern and unlike the previous comment, is a perfectly legitimate use of moving time logs. It would be very helpful indeed if this was a core feature.

[Joe Murray]

This would be a very useful feature.

[Patrick Macdonald]

"You should never assume that "entering garbage and (often failing bother) correcting it later" is the right thing to do"

That's not the most constructive comment I would expect from a community leader. I don't think people ever suggested that entering `garbage` or `failing to bother correcting` was their way of working and making that assumption doesn't do yourself any favours. 

There are clearly legitimate situations where time-logs may need to be moved to other tasks. Perhaps Atlassian could address this obviously useful feature request.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It was from a 7 years ago, when I was a lot more grumpy in my postings.  Nowadays, I would be more gentle.

The core idea still stands though - you really do not want people entering rubbish just to jump through some hoops, they will not consistently return to update them later, so why make it easier to enter junk and correct when you should be encouraging them to spend less time getting it right the first time.

But when you do work that way, you have the functions to add new and delete, and a couple of apps (Tempo is the one I know allows you several routes to do it) support "move worklog" properly.  Because there are apps that do it, I don't think it's high on Atlassian's feature list.

[foldeslaszlo]

Policy reasons might change the way people work.

At my company, people were allowed to log certain work to the same task, let's call it "BAU" or "ad-hoc" where the spent time is small.

There was a maximum limit of 2 hours that can be logged to such a task. If a task is longer than that, an individual issue had to be created.

Now we have changed this limit to 1 hour, so I want to move every worklog that is longer than 1 hour to an individual task. I would assign this task to someone, if that someone would be able to 1.) move worklog to different tasks, 2.) log work in the name of other users. Both of these cannot be done in Jira.

Instead I have to put this task to each and every user so they create the tasks and move their own worklogs to those tasks (delete + re-add). They will hate it (different personalities) and surely there will be errors on the way.