Actually, it isn't necessary to add the Epic Status field to the screen in order to change the value. Once the transition happens, the Epic Status will be updated in the background and the history log will reflect that change.

The workaround is only a minor annoyance (compared to the large number of other fixes Atlassian has yet to get to) in that you make one change to the workflow for it to work like it should.

Also find this incredibly irritating. Going to try the workaround mentioned above.

The workaround I've been using, which isn't great, is to configure the workflow to automatically set Epic Status on transitions, and then hide the Epic Status field in the screens.  But I've always been puzzled at the need for both.  I prefer the solution used in Status Categories (https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver071/defining-status-field-values-802592405.html) where you just map workflow statuses to a more general status "bucket" that allows Jira to decide whether an item is New/In Progress/Done.

Please fix!

Definitely a frustrating issue.  I'm currently re-introducing Jira to my team and was trying to clean up old epics clogging up the Epic Panel and had to reopen ~40 Closed Epics just to Mark them as Done and get them off the Epic Panel.  

Hello,

Quite a few Easy Agile customers have run into this scenario. We have written a blog post about how to calculate the cycle time of epics, and how to Epic Status and Jira Status in sync: Understanding the cycle time of epics in Jira

In addition, these posts on Atlassian Community show that others have difficulty with the split between Jira Status and Epic Status:

• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Marking-Epic-as-quot-Done-quot-on-completing-an-epic-in-the/qaq-p/626727
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Do-Jira-Epics-update-status-automatically-or-do-you-have-to/qaq-p/689163
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Epic-Status-vs-Epic-Workflow/qaq-p/29710
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/EPIC-Status-Vs-Status/qaq-p/728237

 I would love to see movement on an improvement here. nicolas.bier has a nice suggestion in JSWSERVER-10836, and it would be great for that to make it to Cloud as well.

Regards,
Nick Muldoon
Product Manager, Easy Agile

I believe this suggestion will go nowhere because "closed" isn't a concept that exists in JIRA. Many workflows don't even use this status.

The only two built-in concepts are statuscategory (the status color), which can be New, In Progress or Complete and an issue's resolution (Resolved/Unresolved).

IMHO, the Epic Status field was a poorly designed workaround from the early days of the RapidBoard.

Please can we change the definition of this suggestion to say: "Resolved Epics should be hidden as well" and eventually deprecate the Epic Status field...

A better alternative would be JSWSERVER-10836, force the Epic Status to always match the statuscategory since they both have the same three values but that would require tampering existing data and I'm sure Atlassian won't go this way.

I agree with Alex Latchford.  We use epics in release planning, and we want to close them out with the release.  The included version reports include epics, but show them as open because they do not close out.  Also, when we resolve epics, they revert back to an open status.  We simply want to permanently close them out and have that recognized across the system.

See JRA-40982. This is the same thing. Also JSW-11062

Can I ask why the "Epic Status" and "Status" fields are different? I haven't been able to find any sane reason for it. I understand this is intended behaviour but I cannot understand why, this ticket describes the frustration I've been having with the "Mark as Done" feature in JIRA Agile.

For completeness my support request can be found at: https://support.atlassian.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/23/JST-193228