Documentation for GreenHopper 6.1.x. Documentation for other versions of JIRA Agile is available too.
GreenHopper is now called JIRA Agile. Learn more.

(info) Note that this page only applies if you are using the Classic Boards (which are no longer being actively developed; read more).
If you are using the new boards, please see Creating an Epic

 

An epic captures a large body of work. It is essentially a large user story that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories. It may take several sprints to complete an epic. 

Epics provide you with an additional hierarchy of story management, providing planning guidance for groups of issues within, or across, projects. This allows ScrumMasters and Product Managers to measure important groups of issues that are all related by a common theme.

See Creating an Epic and Adding an Issue to an Epic.

(Note: In JIRA, epic is a searchable field — see the JIRA JQL documentation for details.)

For more on Epics you may want to read over these two excellent articles:

Epics are implemented in GreenHopper via a JIRA custom field of type 'label', which are used to associate cards with a parent epic.

From GreenHopper 5.3, your GreenHopper project must use the 'Scrum' template to successfully work with Epics. Upon applying this template to your GreenHopper project, you will then be able to associate Epics with other GreenHopper issue types and vice versa (as described in Working with Epics in GreenHopper Classic).