Documentation for GreenHopper 4.1. Documentation for other versions of JIRA Agile is available too.
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An epic is essentially a large user story that can be broken up into several smaller user stories. Epics are typically used to capture large and complex items from the product backlog that are low priority and are yet to be defined in great detail.

Epics are implemented in GreenHopper via labels. Once you add the 'epic' field to your cards, you can specify an issue on that card to use as the epic. You can then view all cards related to that epic via the GreenHopper search. We recommend that you set up a new issue type to use for epics. This is not essential, but it will help you to distinguish epics from other issue types like stories.

Setting up epics for your project is a simple two-step process:

Creating an 'Epic' Issue Type in JIRA

(info) As mentioned above, creating an 'Epic' issue type is optional. If you don't want to do this, you can simply configure your cards to use the 'epic' custom field as described below.

To create an 'Epic' issue type,

  1. Log in as a user with the 'JIRA Administrators' global permission.
  2. Bring up the administration page by clicking either the 'Administration' link on the top bar or the title of the Administration box on the dashboard.
  3. Create a new issue type, as described in the JIRA documentation: Defining Issue Type Field Values and name it 'Epic'.
  4. Associate the issue type with your project, if you have an issue type scheme set up for it, as described in the JIRA documentation: Associating Issue Types with Projects

Creating an 'Epic' Custom Field in JIRA

(info) As mentioned above, creating an 'Epic' custom field requires the JIRA Labels Plugin to be installed.

To create an 'Epic' custom field,

  1. Log in as a user with the 'JIRA Administrators' global permission.
  2. Bring up the administration page by clicking either the 'Administration' link on the top bar or the title of the Administration box on the dashboard.
  3. Create a new custom field of the 'Label Field' type, as described in the JIRA documentation: Adding a Custom Field and name it 'Epic'.
  4. Associate the custom field with your project.

Configuring your Cards to Use the 'epic' Custom Field

To configure your cards to use the 'Epic' custom field,

  1. Log in as a user with the 'Administer Projects' permission for the project.
  2. Click the 'Tools' menu and click 'Configuration' from the dropdown. The project configuration page will display.
  3. Click the 'CARD TEMPLATES' tab. The issue card and list template configuration screen will display. The 'List' view will be located in the top panel, the 'Card' view in the bottom left panel and the 'Summary' view in the bottom right panel.
  4. Configure the card templates for your project as described in Configuring your Card Templates and add the 'Epic' custom field to the desired issue types.





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