How do you get an Epic to reappear on the Scrum board after you marked it as done?

Woody Arnold

I recently ran into this issue. Greenhopper 6, the new Scrum Board and Epic feature (which is pretty cool). You can select the little colored sqaure next to the Epic and choose "Mark as Done". This makes it disappear from the board. Which is kind of nice. But what if you find out it really wasn't done? How can you get it back? When you open the issue associated with the Epic, you'll find that its status field is unchanged. Yes, unchanged even though you marked it as "Done". Hmmm... See answer next...

Woody Arnold

With the new implementation of Epics in GH 6, there are several new fields. One of which is "Epic Status". This is the status field that was changed when you selected "Mark as Done" (Not the "normal" status field). Complicating matters, this field is not visible when you open the Epic/issue for editing. Good news is the field is availble via Bulk Update. So find the Epic you want to return to the board. Go through the Bulk Update flow, select the correct state (e.g. To Do) for the Epic Status field. Perform the update and the Epic should now reappear on the scrumboard. Yeah!

As a side note: There are a few other fields that were implemented for Epic in the 6.0 release -- Epic Name and Epic Link. I've found knowing that these fileds exist to be useful. Epic Name is the name that shows up on the board (rather than Summary). Epic Link is the Key of the Parent Epic.