How do I triage an inherited project?

[Matt Alford]

I'm new to Jira and I inherited a project with 130 open items. I'm not sure what's the best way to clean it up.  It has:

1) Epics and issues that are junk and need to be deleted or removed or archived

2) Items selected for development that are never going to be developed

What's the best practice for getting rid of the junk and resetting the status on issues that will stay?  

Thanks.

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi Matt! Given what you have conveyed and speaking from a bit of experience here is what i would say

If I was taking over a project and wanted to clean stuff up I would identify the list of issues that I believe to be unnecessary. I would then, out of respect for the team, review the list with the team and suggest closing them as "Won't Do". The details of how are something like this...

1. Create a filter that has all of the issues in the list
2. Use bulk update to move them to Done and set the Resolution to "Won't Do", "Cancelled" or similar. I would also place a label on them, something like "project-reset", so that you could always recall/refer to them as necessary,. You may also wish to put a canned comment on them explaining why they are being closed as "Won't Do".

What I would not do is delete the issues as it is unnecessary at best and can cause undesirable issues.