Work management
Bulk edit
One change, many items — and what happens when one of them cannot take it.
Select work on the list or table layout and a bar appears: state, assignee, priority, sprint, release, and adding a label. Every control starts at *leave alone*, so a bulk edit changes exactly the fields you chose. A form pre-filled with the first item's values is how fifty items silently take on one item's assignee.
It applies what it can and names what it did not
Refusing the whole batch because one item breaks a rule is the safer-looking option and it is wrong in practice: you cannot see which one, so you bisect the selection by hand. The fear people have of partial application — what state am I in now? — only exists if the result is vague. It is not: every refusal comes back with the item and the reason. What is never allowed is a silent skip.
Rules a bulk edit still obeys
- Cadence. An item whose project follows a different cadence cannot be moved into that sprint, exactly as a drag cannot. A bulk edit is the obvious way around a rule only the drag enforced.
- Shipped work. An item in a release that has already shipped cannot be moved to another state — that would rewrite what a version contained.
- Labels ADD rather than replace. Replacing the set would strip every other label off fifty items, and the person who did it would have no way to know what had been there.
Watchers hear about a bulk edit exactly as they hear about a single one. This is a common way for work to actually move, and a change that is invisible because of how it was made is worse than a noisy one.
Two hundred items at a time. A larger selection is almost always somebody having pressed select-all on a filter that did not mean what they thought, and the refusal is cheaper than the undo.