Documentation for GreenHopper 6.2.x. Documentation for earlier versions of GreenHopper is [available too].


25 October 2012

The Atlassian team announces the release of GreenHopper 6.0.6, bringing you our first implementation of epics.

This release also includes a number of fixes.

Upgrading to GreenHopper 6.0.6 is free for all customers with an active GreenHopper license.

If you are using GreenHopper "behind-the-firewall" (that is, if GreenHopper is installed on-premises at your site), you can upgrade GreenHopper via the JIRA Plugin Manager. Before upgrading, please read the GreenHopper 6.0.6 Upgrade Notes.

If you are using GreenHopper OnDemand, please watch the GreenHopper OnDemand Release Summary for the latest updates.

 

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):

(tick) 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.

The new implementation of epics will eventually include an 'Epic Status' field that will be used to exclude epics that are complete. To exclude any pre-existing epics in your system that are complete change the filter for your board to include 'and (issuetype != Epic or resolution is empty)'

The new implementation of epics does not use the 'Epic/Theme' field at all, its value is ignored

 

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Updates and fixes in this release

GreenHopper 6.0.6 includes the following updates and bug fixes:

T Key Summary
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16 Comments

  1. Robert Gosselin

    Oct 25, 2012

    Awesome!

    Now if we could just be able to associate sub-tasks from different JIRA projects under one user story, we would be able to have multiple functional team (Server, Win, Mac...) working on one user story at a time w/o having to duplicate user story across projects. Or is this possible and I just do not know how to enable that in Jira?

    Getting the Epic working is a great accomplishments! Thanks.

     

  2. Ganga Selvarajah

    Oct 26, 2012

    Firstly: Thanks to GH team....

    Great to see this features....

    Cheers

    Ganga S

  3. Anonymous

    Oct 26, 2012

    How do you remove an Epic from the left-hand side? Even after closing the Epic, it's still showing up there?

    Also, the Create Epic button shows up even if the project doesn't have issue type Epic enabled.

    1. Shaun Clowes

      Oct 28, 2012

      There's no built in way to do this at the moment, we suggest modifying your board's filter to include something like 'and (issuetype != Epic or resolution is empty)' which will filter out Epics that have a resolution set. 

      Thanks,
      Shaun 

  4. Davey Lei

    Oct 26, 2012

    This is great.  What is the best way to have them show up as swimlanes on the scrum board.  Having a hard time locating the epic label field to use to make this work.  Thanks.

    1. Svavar Melberg

      Oct 27, 2012

      Yes, I would also like to know this (smile)

      Regards, Svavar Melberg

      1. Shaun Clowes

        Oct 28, 2012

        There's no way to do this at the moment, we may consider this for a future release but could you provide some more detail on what you're aiming to see about Epics while a Sprint is running? 

        Thanks,
        Shaun 

  5. Jon Arlov

    Oct 30, 2012

    I'm really liking the Epics, but I have some trouble assigning tasks to an epic. My problem is that I have a fairly large backlog and assigning tasks in the middle of the backlog to the epics requires a lot of scrolling.

    For me it would make sense if the list of epics floated so that they stayed in the same position on the left side as you scrolled down the list of issues, although that may not be ideal if you have a lot of epics. Another possibility would be a way to connect an issue to an epic somewhere in the detail view for that issue.

    1. Anonymous

      Nov 01, 2012

      Second that! It would also be beneficial if we could retroactively associate our closed issues to epics. Relabelling closed epics would also be good.

      1. Anonymous

        Jan 03, 2013

        I third this ( ability to "retroactively associate our closed issues to epics")  Because the linking mechanism has changed and it was not retro-actively applied it, customers will need to do it manually to make the info displayed accurate and for properly reporting of the data.
        To date I've yet to find a user flow for adding an epic association to a story via a screen. I enabled the 'Epic Link' field on all screens, but the best it will do is show the field (after set via drag and drop from planning view) no form based edit-ability is available in view or edit modes that I've found to date.  Since the planning view restricts closed issues (maybe I can hack around this with a custom filter) this makes it impossible manually apply Issue -> Epic links using the drag and drop method for resolved work.

        Thanks!

    2. Rosie Jameson [Atlassian]

      Nov 04, 2012

      Jon, you may like to watch/vote/comment on GHS-6432 - Getting issue details... STATUS

  6. Anonymous

    Nov 14, 2012

    Why is Atlassian with the new Greenhopper always punishing the current users without providing a migration path to old projects? This is ridiculous! As nice as it is to have new features, you DO have to have migration options. Please, listen to you customers, especially those who are not(warning)  new but have used your projects for years... It is easy to attract people who are new to greenhopper but I think you make your life too easy by just dropping the requirements and by not providing a migration option of the current customers.

    (sad) Stefan

    1. Nicholas Muldoon [Atlassian]

      Nov 15, 2012

      Hi Stefan,

      Sorry to hear that you feel we are punishing you. Unfortunately a migration path is not possible, I'll explain why. 

      In the past we gave you the option of nesting Fix Versions within Fix Versions, not a part of JIRA itself but functionality that GreenHopper provided. Some customers made use of nested Fix Versions for sprints, others for releases, and others for Teams, Sprints and Releases, all in different combinations.

      While we provided Epics functionality using labels there was no enforced linking method. Again, different customers had different conventions. 

      These are two simple examples where a migration is not possible - what would work well for an automatic migration of one customer could completely clobber another customer.

      For that reason we chose not to force a migration and allow customers to manually migrate when they are ready, and when they believe the new GreenHopper has the functionality they need to support their teams.

      Thank you Stefan.

      Regards,
      Nicholas Muldoon 

      1. Anonymous

        Dec 30, 2012

        Hi Nicholas - I've possibly duplicated this unnecessarily but we are in the midst of trying to configure JIRA correctly so was hoping for a speedy reply (even if it is New Year's Eve (smile)),

        I've created an Issue Type called Epic and was going to have a workflow transition to create a sub-task called User Story and save some typing. I was also hoping that time tracking and total story points would roll up to the Epic level as a result. In version 5.8 of Greenhopper, sub-tasks are not displaying in Rapid Boards even though they are listed in my filter. They are also not rolling up story points to the Epic level.

        The question is – what's the direction in the newer versions? Should I continue with Epic Task & User Story Sub-task or should I be using "Clone & Move" (ie. Epic Task & User Story Task – but linked)?

        Regards,

        Richard richard.roose@metcash.com

  7. Anonymous

    Dec 30, 2012

    Hi,

    I've created an Issue Type called Epic and was going to have a workflow transition to create a sub-task called User Story and save some typing. I was also hoping that time tracking and total story points would roll up to the Epic level as a result. In version 5.8 of Greenhopper, sub-tasks are not displaying in Rapid Boards even though they are listed in my filter. They are also not rolling up story points to the Epic level.

    The question is – what's the direction in the newer versions? Should I continue with Epic Task & User Story Sub-task or should I be using "Clone & Move" (ie. Epic Task & User Story Task – but linked)?

    Regards,

    Richard richard.roose@metcash.com

    1. Rosie Jameson [Atlassian]

      Jan 06, 2013

      Please see discussion at Adding an Issue to an Epic



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