Description Required Field Cannot be changed

[ayoung]

My project has requested we make this field Required. However, its greyed out and I cannot interact with it - is that because of some global rule my company as set? Or is there something on my project somewhere else I need to change?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @ayoung 

What problem are you trying to solve by requiring data in the Description field?

In Team Managed projects it is not possible currently to make the Description field a Required field.

You could set up a Rule on every transition to require data in the Description field. Unfortunately that rule can't be added to the Create transition, so new issues could be created with no Description. They just couldn't be changed to any other status if you added the rule to every other transition.

You could have an Automation Rule run to check each newly created issue for Description content, and email somebody if one is created without information.

You could also add a Custom Paragraph field, call it something like Required Description, and make that field Required. You can't remove the original Description field though, so it might be confusing having the two fields.

[ayoung]

Hi @Trudy Claspill 

Thank you for the quick reply. 

Problem we're solving for is:  For a year or more the team were not required to put in descriptions, it was just a couple of people using it and they "knew" each others work.

Now with a larger team using it we need to include descriptions so others know what the tickets are about, but its being forgotten from old memory programming of being able to skip it. 

Reason this is an issue: During planning sessions we refer to this field to know exactly what the work is, but its often empty (this is being revealed prior to the sprint happening or transition changes occurring)  I created a template so they know what types of info they have to include as seen in screenshot above, so its never really "empty"

Maybe I could run a Cron job to check if the description contains only the template info then email the users 3 days after creation and remind them it cannot be left that way? 

Isn't there some limitation for automation on checking paragraph type fields for conditions for automation rules to execute? I feel like I ran into this before.   I believe I addressed it by creating a label at ticket creation and applying a cron job to the label afterwards. 

Would that work?  Am I over complicating this?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @ayoung 

Sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you.

If you want to use an automation rule the check the Description field, you could use the length() function to get the character count from the Description field and then compare that to the character count of the template text.

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-smart-values-text-fields/#length--