Question about Epics spanning across multiple sprints and User Stories are also open along with Epic

Question

We have a big Epic spanning across 3 sprints.

The branch can be merged only when everything is fully complete. We cannot deliver incomplete Epics. Then the Epic can be closed.

Every User Story has a branch. Unless the branch is merged to main,

the User Story is kept open. It is marked to Done when the branch is merged.

Since the main-branch of the Epic is not merged to main, all the user stories

are open. It is showing that we have done not much progress.

What is the best way to mark the user stories which has been merged to the feature branch?

“Feature” branch is merged after 2-3 sprints. Feature branch is for an Epic.

“Sub-Feature” branch is merged every 3-4days. Sub-Feature branch is for User Story. We don't want to mark the User Stories as DONE unless it is available in Main branch.

So all the User Stories are showing in progress. The burn down chart is not correct.

What is the best way to address this?

unknown · Answer

Thanks Derek.

We need to understand that the story has not been merged to Master, by looking at the status of the user story. Status may be DONE, but resolution can be marked to "MERGED TO EPIC BRANCH"?

When the Epic branch is not merged to Master, how do we see, that the branch for the closed user story is merged to the EPIC and not to the Master?

Jira supports many states, custom fields but don't want to confuse the team with too many new states and status. Want to keep it simple.

What do you suggest?

Regards

Abhi

Derek Fields _RightStar_ · Answer

It seems to me that the source of your problem is that your branching strategy doesn't match your Jira workflow strategy. In my experience, we don't try to match Epics to branches. Epics are used to group stories for planning purposes but don't dictate branching strategy. If you want to match  Epics to your branching worklfow, I suggest that you create an Epic branch from main and that the Story (Feature) branches get branched from their parent Epic branch. When you merge a Feature branch back into the Epic, you would close the Story. When the Epic has no more Feature branches, the Epic can be merged into main, closed and delivered.

The downside of this is that if you have cross-dependencies between Epics, you won't see the merge conficts until you roll your Epics up to the release branch level. You may find that you have  a lot more conflict resolution to do. On the other hand, some experience will lead you to  better define your Epics to limit these dependencies, which is a good practice in itself.