How long should Epics remain open?

[Cabby]

Are there risks to leaving Epic issues open for a full year or longer? Our general guidelines are that Project issues are open approximately 3 months to 1 year, Epics approximately several weeks to 3 months and Task issues approximately 1 - 7 days. We're a relatively new infrastructure transformation and need to establish best practices. We have / are a new user community.

[Laura Campbell _Seibert Media_]

Hi @Cabby welcome to Community!

There's definitely no risk, like Marc said, but another to keep in mind is the kind of reporting you may want to do.

Do you want to do a monthly or quarterly report showing work completed vs in progress? If your Epic is so huge it takes 4 or more quarters, you won't have completed Epics to report very often, and just lots of stories/tasks finished. There's nothing inherently wrong with this from a Jira configuration pov, but psychologically many people like to see that things are being finished and marked done.

Get started, and plan on a feedback session in a couple months so everyone using Jira can talk about whether or not the initial set up is still working, or if it needs to be adjusted. 

[Marc Koppelaar]

Hi @Cabby 

There are now riks, it depends on your WoW.

We usually use the 3 ,month guideline, but issues related for support we use a yearly epic.

So even in a single project you can differentiate in time.

But the guideline as a development company the best practice is to use the 3 month period.