This new feature request is about a more effective interface to let you perform bulk operations on bugs, with more resolution than changing the same field(s) on every bug to the same thing. Let's call it a "mass" operation instead of "bulk".

Consider this scenario: you are doing triage on a set of open bugs - reprioritizing, potentially reassigning, setting due dates and versions, perhaps resolving as "postponed". This triage could be daily, or it could be the result of a change in schedule or feature set that makes you need to revisit a bunch of them. Now, as a producer or dev lead or whatever, you're very familiar with most of these bugs, so a glance at the Summary field in the Issue Navigator is usually enough to let you know what's going on.

I don't know about everyone else who uses Jira, but for my team this is a really common scenario. Anyway, right now you have two options to do your mass update:

1. Go through every bug one at a time and do the combination of edits, and workflow transitions required.
2. Subdivide bulk edits based on type - so do all setting-to-pri-1 in one pass, setting-to-pri-2 in another pass, reassigning-to-Bob in another pass...

Both of these are really tedious and it makes it really hard to go through a lot of bugs and update them very quickly, to the point that we don't do it nearly as often as we should. I've got a proposal for this.

Proposal:

Have a new "mass edit" feature that is similar to Step 1 of Bulk Operation: an Issue Navigator style grid, except instead of each field being static, have it be editable. If it's a priority field, say, it would become a drop-down of all priorities, with the current priority for that bug selected, rather than static text. If it's the Assignee field, it would become a drop-down of all available people to assign to (with the current assignee selected), and so on. There should also be a previous step to Mass Edit that lets you choose which fields appear in this grid, so what's visible is only what you want to change.

In addition, have a column at the end (enabled via that "previous step" I just mentioned) that lets you select possible workflow transitions, again via a drop-down (defaulting to "leave as-is") that shows all possible transitions for each bug - the same list as would appear in the "Operations" section on the left bar if you were to be viewing that individual bug.

The "next" step would confirm the changes that are proposed, and then a "next" after that to commit them. First it would do the edit updates, then it would do the workflow transitions. Perhaps it would give you a button to continue working with the bugs that had workflow transitions, in case you wanted to send them through further transitions (i.e. go back to step 1).

Maybe a better name for this feature would be Grid Mass Edit or something. Some other bugbases have this feature (such as Microsoft's RAID) and it's extremely useful for working quickly through a set of bugs.