How to show epics where no story, task or sub-task has been started

Question

Hi,

I am trying to write a Filter to produce a list of Epics on the Backlog where an Epic has had no work done on it at all i.e:

1. None of the Epic's Stories or Sub-Tasks have been started

2. None of the Stories in the Epic have Tasks that have been started

Is there a way to do this with JQL ?

David Nickell · Answer

I don't have a definitive answer for you, but here are some things you might consider:

* If you have a premium license, the plan view filtering and repoting capabilities might let you see the universe of tickets you want.
* Or, maybe you could use an automation rule to update a flag at the Epic level when a Story Moves from "new" to its first status.

Just some ramblings that may give you siome different approaches.

Walter Buggenhout · Answer

Hi @Michael Green,

No, not really with out of the box functionality. JQL is quite powerful, but lacks a bit of flexibility when it comes to searching by related work items.

There are marketplace apps available that extend these capabilities. If that's an option you are open to explore, this list might be useful to explore.

You can, however, work around that with automation. This is a typical use case where keeping workflow statuses aligned between parent and child items comes in handy. If you could automate your workflows so that when a first story / sub-task changes status, you automatically also update the status of its parent's items accordingly, you can solve your requirement by simply searching by epic status.

In human language: If your epic workflow is To Do > In Progress > Done and a first child story changes to an in progress status, make sure you automate the parent epic's status to In Progress. All your epics with status To Do then become the ones where no work has been done at all.

Hope this helps!