Associating Epics with Versions?

Jace Proctor May 5, 2015

I was excited when I saw that JIRA has Versions, as I thought they were one step higher in the hierarchy after Epics.  I thought the relationship would be that Stories are assigned to Epics, and Epics are assigned to Versions.  It seemed a good way to keep track without just throwing a ton of Stories into a Version.

However... I don't see a way to associate Epics with Versions.  They just stay in their column.  I can drag and drop Stories onto Versions... but not Epics. 

How does that make sense?  What good is the Epic if you can't use it to organize Stories in the Agile Board view?  

3 answers

1 vote
Nicolas Bourdages
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May 6, 2015

To associate an Epic with a version, it's true that you can't drag and drop it in the Version tab, but that's just one of the ways of assigning a version. If you make sure that in the Screen Scheme used by Epics, the Affects Version field is present for the Edit operation, you can just edit the Epic and select a value from the available versions.

Ideally, to do this in as few steps as possible, you should select a version at the creation of the Epic, again, provided your Screen Scheme displays this field on Create.

You can also do a Bulk Change if you're in the Issues view to quickly set several Epics to a given version.

As you see, you have several options to assign a version to an Epic.

Hope this helps!

Spyder McHenry August 17, 2018

This still doesn't cause associated epics to be "not-opaque" when you have the associated release highlighted...which is counter intuitive. It would be really nice to be able to filter/sort epics with versions in the same way that you can filter/sort issues with epics. Maybe I'm still missing something though. I have the epic set in Affected Version(s) and Fix Version and it still does not sort my epics based on my version selected on the left column of the plan view.

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Frederico Amaral de Olivera January 16, 2019

It is not working for me too. I tried to write the version name on affected and fixed version fields and I could not see any link between epics and versions.  

Mike Rowe April 17, 2019

@Spyder McHenry

Did you ever find a solution to this? I'm assuming that your end goal was to visually separate the EPICs and its User Stories within the project into two or more distinctive Version so you could better manage the project?

In some ways you are breaking the project into sub-projects correct?

Spyder McHenry April 22, 2019

Yes, the EPICS are small projects (or sub projects) of the whole desired release. The release can include EPICS from multiple teams/disciplines/parts of the product. It would be nice to be able to grab a release then see all the EPICS that are part of the release. We have moved on from this approach however and are now experimenting with the NEXT-GEN project style. We've been stripping down processes a bit to make the next-gen stuff work for us. It's mostly helpful. The trade-offs of the new limitations we have to accept are less bad than the crazy work it took to manage several projects sharing configs, issue types, permissions, workflows, etc., etc., etc.

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Klajdi Hoxha Sina March 9, 2021

Yes, Its very annoying not beinig able to asociate Epics to Versions from backlog view, in the same way that we can asociate (by Drag and Drop) Issues to an Epic OR Issues to a version

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C
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May 9, 2015

To add a version to an epic,  simply edit the epic.  If the fixVersion is missing check with your admin to see if it is part of your screen scheme.

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