Working with epics

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An epic captures a large body of work, e.g. performance-related work in a release. It is essentially a large user story that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories. An epic can span more than one project, if multiple projects are included in the board to which the epic belongs. Unlike sprints, scope change in epics is a natural aspect of agile development. Epics are almost always delivered over a set of sprints. As a team learns more about an epic through development and customer feedback, some user stories will be added and removed to optimize the team's release time.

There may be differences on how epics are displayed and configured between Scrum and Kanban boards — especially if you're using the Kanban backlog in a Kanban project. See Managing epics in a Scrum project and Managing epics in a Kanban project for more information.

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Linking a Confluence page to an Epic

If you have linked your JIRA Software instance to a Confluence instance, you can create and link Confluence pages to your epics. For example, you may want to link your epic to a specification or design document in Confluence.

Learn more: Linking a Confluence page to an epic

Tips

  • You can also use the JQL Epic Link  field to search for an epic's issues — see JQL for details.
  • There is no way to reopen an epic from the board. However, if you are a JIRA admin, you can reopen an epic via the following workaround:
    1. Add the Epic Status field to the View and Edit screens of your project.
    2. View the epic issue in JIRA.
    3. Edit the epic issue and set Epic Status to either "To Do" or "In Progress".
    4. (optional) Undo step 1.

Next steps

(info) Need help? If you can't find the answer you need in our documentation, we have other resources available to help you. See Getting help.

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Last modified on Sep 30, 2016

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