Epics - Jira Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this video, we will discuss epics. We will describe epics, work with epics, and manage epics in the backlog. Here's the hierarchy of issue types in Jira. An epic is unique in that it can contain other issue types, such as story, tasks, and bugs. Stories, tasks, and bugs can contain subtasks. So this defines a hierarchy of three levels. An epic represents a large issue. Epics can contain other issues, such as stories, tasks, and bugs. Child issues of an epic can span multiple iterations, projects, teams, and boards. This is a unique feature of epics. When you first create an epic, it can be a single issue that represents a placeholder for many stories. As the team gets closer to working on the epic, they can add the child issues to fill in the details. Epics are used because they are a way to organize the work items. They are also used because they can span multiple iterations and projects. Epics can simplify the backlog because you can represent a large amount of work as one issue at first. Next, we will discuss working with epics. To create an epic, you can create an issue and select the issue type of epic. You will then name the epic as we've done here. To view the issues of an epic, you can open the epic issues details and you will see a list of issues in the epic. When you are creating issues that will be children of the epic, you can use the epic link field to select the parent epic. Here, we are creating an issue and linking it to the parent epic named feature A. If you have an existing issue and you want to add it to an epic, you can use the epic link field and select the parent epic. All issues of an epic have the same epic link field pointing to the parent epic issue. You can search for all of the issues of the epic using JQL. You want to search for all issues within an epic link field equal to the parent epic issue. Here we are searching for all of the issues of the feature A epic. When issues have been added to an epic, you will see the epic label in the cards on the project board. You can create swimlanes by epic on the project board. In this case, we have a swimlane for the feature A epic. All of the issues without epics are below this swimlane. Next, we will discuss epics in the backlog. If you navigate to the backlog tab of a Scrum project, you can create epics. Click on the create epic link to begin creating the epic. You will then be able to name the epic and provide a summary. Once you have created an epic, you can see the epics panel in the backlog. This is a handy way to see the current state of the epic. For example, you can see how many of the issues have been completed. You can also create issues in the epic right from the backlog. When the issues of the epic are all done, you can mark the epic itself as done. Here, we are selecting the dropdown menu associated with the epic and selecting mark as done. Once the epic is marked as done, it will no longer show up in the backlog. An epic report shows the details of the epic. You can see how many of the story points and issues have been completed. You can also see a list of the issues, as well as their current status. If your epic spans multiple sprints, you can use the epic burndown chart to see the progress for each sprint. Here's a review of what we've discussed. An epic is a large issue type that may contain other issues. The epic link field is used to associate issues with an epic. Epics can be shown on boards or in backlogs.