Symptoms

It should be possible for users to complete an Epic from the any board's backlog page, by marking that Epic as Done from the option ... > Mark as Done, as shown in the screenshot below:

However, there may be some circumstances that the "Mark as Done" option is missing from the drop down menu, as per illustrated in the screenshot below:

Environment

Jira Software Server / Data Center 7.0.0 and any higher version.

Diagnosis

• Go to the page ⚙ > Issues > Custom Fields
• Search for the field Epic Status
• Click on the link ... > View next to the field
  
  • If the View option is not available after clicking on ..., click on Configure instead
    
• Check the Context configuration which applies to the Epic Issue type. If there are no options listed, as shown in the screenshot below, then this KB article is relevant, and you can move on to the Resolution section:
  

Cause

In order to be able to mark an Epic as done, the Epic Status field needs to have the following options available:

• To Do
• In Progress
• Done

Please note that, in any fresh out-of-the-box installation of Jira Software, this field is a native Jira field which comes by default with these options. Also, this field is locked, meaning that it cannot be edited and these options cannot be removed.

However, since Jira native fields can technically be unlocked by following the instructions from the KB article Unlock a locked Jira Software custom field, Jira admin users can edit the Epic Status options after manually unlocking this field from the Database (although we highly recommend not to unlock any locked field, as explained in that KB article).

If a Jira Admin user removes the options available for this field and for the Epic issue type, it will no longer be possible to mark Epics as Done from the boards.

Resolution

To fix the issue, we need to add back the default options to the Epic Status field, by following the steps below:

• Log in as a Jira Administrator user
• Go to the page ⚙ > Issues > Custom Fields, and search for the Epic Status field
• Check if this field is showing as LOCKED 
  • If this field is not locked, move on to the next step
  • If this field is locked, follow the instructions from the KB article Unlock a locked Jira Software custom field to unlock it
• Once the field is un-locked, click on the link ... > Configure next to it
  
• If you see multiple context configurations for this field, identify the configuration which is associated to the Epic issue type
• Click on the Edit options link, and add the following options:
  • To Do
  • In Progress
  • Done
• After you add these options, the Field Configuration should match what is shown in the screenshot below:
  
• Go to ⚙ > System > Indexing and re-index the Jira application for the field configuration update to be effective (you can run either a background index or lock index)
• Follow the instructions from the KB article Unlock a locked Jira Software custom field to re-lock the field. It is very important to re-lock this field, to prevent Jira admins from re-editing its configuration
• Go back to the board backlog page, and verify that Epics can now be marked as done