NOTE: This suggestion is for JIRA Cloud. Using JIRA Server? See the corresponding suggestion.

Hi everyone,

As always, thank you for watching, commenting and engaging with us on this ticket. As you might be aware, we’ve gone through a recent re-balancing exercise here at Atlassian to better reflect operating in a changing and difficult macroeconomic environment. As part of the difficult decisions that have been made to prioritise the most critical work for our customers, we’ve had to put this work on pause for the next few quarters.

In the cases where Issue Templates will provide a suitable workaround - I’m aware of a number of apps (both free and paid) that offer the ability to create templates for different issue types. You can find them here: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?product=jira&query=templates

In terms of silver linings, I’d like to share that we have made progress on investigating and clarifying the requirements and engineering work that is required, so when we are ready to pick this up again, we won't have to go back to zero.

I know that this is disappointing for many of you, especially in light of the previous update, please accept my sincere thanks for your patience and understanding for this matter.

Regards,

Carol

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Update from Nov 2022

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your continued engagement on this request. As part of a larger initiative to improve the way fields can be configured, we are planning to bring the ability to configure field contexts for Priority, Description, and potentially other system fields. We have started design work for this and will be onboarding a team to work on it from Q1 next year, and I will provide periodical updates on this ticket.

We are prioritising the Description field as we have heard from you that it is the most pressing need, but eventually will be extending the support to other system fields once we better understand your use cases for those fields.

While we’re building this and other improvements to how you configure fields in Jira, we welcome you to join our focus group and work with us to shape the future of configuration in Jira. If you are interested, please email me at clow@atlassian.com and I’ll share more details on the group.

Regards

Carol

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Update from November 2021

Hi everyone,

Thank you for watching, voting, and commenting on this issue. We understand this has been a long running request. We also understand this has caused a lot of frustration so I don't want to ignore that fact, but I do hope to strike a chord of optimism with this update.

A recap of the current workarounds:

(1) Utilising team-managed projects

1. From your project sidebar, go to Project settings > Issue types.
2. Select Description and update the default description you want to see when you’re creating an issue.

(2) Add Description text for a field

Note: Before you begin, you’ll need to set up a field configuration scheme for your issue types in your project.

To update the description for the Description field:

1. Go to Settings > Issues > Field configuration.
2. Select Field configuration.
3. Under Actions, select Configure.
4. Find the Description field, and select Edit.
5. Update the description for the field 'Description' in the text box.

The description you add will come up when you create an issue of a certain issue type if it has been associated with the screen. Learn more about associating fields with screens.

(3) Configure automation rules for your system fields.

There’s some suggested workflows from other community members in Default text for Description field on Jira Cloud.

Learn more about automation rules in Jira cloud.

As for building the feature to add default values to system fields in company-managed projects, it is still on our radar.

For transparency, there’s a number of foundational pieces we are working on in order to unblock this feature. At this stage we hope to be able to start work on this in 12 months - we understand it’s a long time and we ask for your continued patience as we work through the implementation.

Please continue to vote and in particular please continue to add comments on how your teams find value when using default values for system fields. This feedback on your specific needs and use cases is invaluable for us as we continue to evolve Jira Cloud.

Regards,

Carol Low
Product Manager, Jira Cloud