Epics now available via Labs

We hope you enjoy the much-requested epics, now available in an initial implementation via Labs. Expect to see further development of epics in upcoming GreenHopper releases in the near future.

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.

In GreenHopper, an epic is simply an issue of type "Epic", which has a label (e.g. "My Epic") with which other issues can then be associated (linked).

Once activated in Labs, you will see an Epics panel at the left of the screen in Plan mode (for Scrum boards only):

A few tips:

• To view just the issues for an epic, click the epic in the left-hand panel.
• You can click Tools > Hide/Show Epic Panel if you wish.
• Epic issues may also appear in Kanban boards that include a project containing epics. To prevent this, add issuetype != epic to your board's filter.
• To allow epics from a different project, add (project = AAA and issuetype = Epic) to your board's filter.

Creating an epic involves specifying the epic's label (please see Creating an Epic for more details):

You can then simply drag-and-drop cards (issues) onto your epic (see Adding an Issue to an Epic):

See also Removing an Issue from an Epic.

Technical notes

If you have previously been using epics on the Classic Boards, please note the following:

• Classic epic-issue relationships are not migrated and the new implementation uses a completely different mechanism to join epics and their issues.
• After epics are enabled in labs we do not recommend using the Classic New Card button or the JIRA Create Issue button to create new epics.
• "Old" epics may be visible in the new "Epics" panel, if they used the "Epic" issue type, but please note that labels will need to entered manually, and links to other stories may need to be recreated.

The Classic implementation of epics is very different to the new implementation which introduces some new custom fields and custom field types. Please see GreenHopper JIRA Configuration for details.

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