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What is an epic?

This page applies to company-managed projects only.

Learn more about the difference between company-managed and team-managed projects.

An epic captures a large body of work—performance-related work, for example—in a release. It's 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 where the epic is created.

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 in how epics are displayed and configured between Scrum and Kanban boards—especially if you're using the Kanban backlog in a Kanban project. See Manage epics in a Scrum project and Manage epics in a Kanban project for more info.

View an epic's issues

You can use the JQL Epic Link field to search for an epic's issues.

Learn more: Advanced searching

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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