Delivery Status of To Do, In Progress and Done isn't sufficient - want Epic status to display

[Corey Hampton]

Can the Epic status be displayed as the Delivery Status yet? Having To Do, In Progress and Done doesn't work for us.

We want the Epic status to display as the Delivery Status so our leadership team can use a View to see where the Epic is at in our SDLC.

[Ted Nieblas · Accepted solution]

@Corey Hampton

It sounds like you are trying to use the Delivery Status field for something it was not intended for. Delivery Status is a default field provided by JPD that displays the number of issues in To Do, In Progress, or Done based on all Delivery Tickets associated with the Idea. If you link an Epic, it will give you the Story/Task breakdown by default. This is common to use and is very useful to engineering folks. For Leadership Teams, this is not as useful. 

In my company we have a separate reporting status custom field (Pending, On-Track, At-Risk, Off-Track) which I set manually for each Idea based on all of the information I receive from the engineering teams, including Epic and other Jira issues that have been identified as Delivery Tickets for that Idea. This is not the same as linking it to the status of an Epic but it does give me the flexibility to have multiple epics (delivery tickets) associated with an Idea so it works for my situation.

It seems reasonable that you could use automation to synch your own custom Delivery status field to that of your Epic using an automation.

[Corey Hampton]

The way the Delivery Status currently works doesn't do us much good. We don't use Stories, only Epic's and Tasks so even the count isn't that helpful because 3 values always show, which means the Story is always 0 and will cause confusion. 

It would be more helpful to choose what Status I want to show based on my companies usage of the tool instead of having to make a custom field, which is what I'll probably end of doing.

Thanks for the response.

[Ted Nieblas]

Epics do not require any stories; they may be made up of one or more stories and/or tasks. Stories/tasks may have one or more sub-tasks but are not required to have any. This is the way "most" software teams define and track work which is why Atlassian implemented it this way. An Epic in and of itself does not represent a single thing that needs to be done, it is intended to represent a group of tasks that meet a useable output that can be tested against a set of requirements.

Delivery Status only counts the Status Categories (To Do, In Progress, Done) of all Delivery Tickets defined for an Idea in JPD. If you only want it to represent the status of the Epic, then I would create a new Issue type (I call mine Milestones) and have that as the only Delivery Ticket defined in JPD. You can control the status of this issue via automation or manual process, and it will represent a single issue that will either be in "To Do", "In Progress", or "Done" status. 

I know this seems like an unnecessary step, but it gets around the default (and widely understood) behavior of the Epic issue type.