Working with epics in next-gen Software projects

[Kevin Bui]

@Michiel Starrenburg - You can hide completed epics from the Roadmap by using the Status filter and selecting the To do and In progress statuses. 

@Carlos Palminha -You can see at a glance which epic each issue belongs to on the board and backlog. For example:

[Bianca Louw]

I'm really hoping future versions of the roadmap shows more details for each epic on the timeline. For instance, if you have many stories in an epic with allocated deadlines for those deadlines to show on that epics timeline as little markers and perhaps even indicate when there are gaps between work for that epic. Like sometimes there might be a week where no work is planned for a specific epic it would prove very handy to show this for effective planning purposes. 

[Emiliano Morales]

The related Epic is not present in any field of each issue (like bug or story). I need to create some filters and I can´t consider the epic.

Do you know if the epic is stored in any field of an issue?

[Abhi_Singh]

I miss the easy functionality of the left-hand side Epics panel in the backlog view, the ability to drag/drop issues onto and view the prioritization of Epics.  Am I just not enabling this view or is this not currently available in Next-Gen?

[Geoff]

In order to work around the fact that you cannot have 2 boards for a next gen project (at least as far as I can tell), I have created a Dashboard with a filtered list - to serve the same purpose.  However, if you add the 'Epic Name' column to the Filtered List, the Epic name is showing as blank in the filtered list.  I'm guessing that column points to the Classic Project Epic Name.  Suggestions  - either on how to create a secondary board for a Next Gen Project, or how to get a Filtered list to show the Epic name?

[Mike Greenspan]

I just want to add my "vote" to bringing in the ability to have a board span multiple next-gen projects. For backlog and project management, it helps to have the separate projects and boards, but I only run a single standup meeting for my whole dev team, and some members have tasks in multiple projects. It is very difficult to need to constantly switch boards to walk the board. Plus, having a single board view of all projects would help developers who are working in multiple projects to get a clearer big picture of their current status.

[Greg Pounds]

Just created a bunch of epics and issues in the next gen project UX.  Linked the issues to epics through the new UX and they show up correctly in the new UX.  However if go and write a search query it says issues don't have epics assigned so I can't use any widgets on the dashboards because they all require search and the search doesn't appear to work.

Is this a known limitation, a potential bug or did I just incorrectly add the issues and epics?

[Brad McNamee]

Being able to group by and filter by epics on the board is great. Is there a way to specify the order that epic swimlanes appear on the board when you group by epic?

[Kristi Meredith]

Is there anyway to make an existing project a next gen project?

[Alex Zendejas]

I am unable to link Stories & Tasks from other projects (made in the classic version) to Epics made in the new gen project. When I attempt to do this, it says the Epic is unlabeled and does not add. 

[clara abello]

Same problem here! want to link the epics in the roadmap to issues in other projects, if not I need to have all epics twice

[David Malenoir-Evans]

It would be great if we could group Epics into an Initiative. This would be really powerful on the new Roadmap

[Andrew Gold]

In a next-gen project, I just ran a quick test sprint, completing all stories assigned to a given epic.

On completing the sprint, those "done" stories disappeared out of the backlog, but were then viewable through issue search - seemingly they're archived in some way. All as expected, great.

The epic which contained them, however was still on the roadmap. It did have a "done" green marker on it, and the timeline bar was greyed out, but it was still shown, and still included in the epic filter menu on the backlog.

(Note: I had manually set the epic status to "done" before completing the sprint.)

In my use case, I'm going to be looking at a lot of epics, so having completed epics persist in the roadmap and menus is going to get cumbersome fast.

What's the intended way to "close" an epic in this next-gen context? I remember a "mark as done" command in the older epics panel that I'm not finding here.

Apologies if this duplicates - I didn't find anything on it searching the boards here.

Thanks!

[Andrew Gold]

I noticed that the display order of epics in the roadmap is adjustable via drag and drop - love it.

However, the epic filter menu in the backlog doesn't seem to update reflecting the "roadmap order" of the epics. That's creating dissonance for me switching from one screen to the next - I'm expecting to see the same order for clarity, or at least have them alphabetically sorted, etc.

Is this on the feature list moving forward somewhere, or did I miss it?

Thanks!

[Arjan Spelt]

It would be great to also be able to remove dates on epics again.

We have loads of ideas that we store in backlog. Sometimes we plan them and sometimes we unplan them. Having a way of removing the date again would be helpful.

[Ian Sheffield]

When do you expect the fields in an Epic to be exposed via the JQL advanced search as both columns and query fields?  

Currently the Epic Link / Epic Name do not get populated for next-gen stories that have an epic assigned.

[Frank_Sobczynski]

Hi @Kevin Bui,

Any way to import an already existing Epic into this roadmap feature? Thanks.

[Anish Patel]

Hi any chance you can add groupings of epics. Usually what I do is we would have a theme “Improve Help” than several epics under that theme such as improve inbox, improve faqs, improve visuals which in turn each would have stories / tasks. I would like to see those not the top level roadmap view much like this 

https://twitter.com/aha_io/status/1062004292700246018?s=21

[Joakim Carlstein]

I really like this Next-gen UI! Good job :)

One thing we really want is cross-project Epics (or a new different entity higher up in the hierarchy, maybe like a "milestone"). Because we have some features that require work in multiple projects to be fully complete and we can't seem to find any entity that can span multiple projects.

Is this a planned feature? Or do you have a suggested workaround which still can give us the overview of all epics in all projects at the same time?

[Geoff]

Thought I would throw my opinion in here as well.  

Love the next gen project.  Happy to trade-off some of the flexibility of 'classic' for the great UI and ease of use - great work Jira team.  Also love the roadmap capability - we are trying to move our roadmap from a spreadsheet to Jira - its getting there.  Some requests below

Must Have ASAP (please!!):

1) Select a Sprint when you create a story - its a pain to go back and drag and drop it from the backlog after you create a story.

2) Select an Epic when you create a story - again - lot of extra work to go back and add the story to an epic. (I know you can create a story within an epic and this skips that step - but thats not always where you are in the UI).

Good To Have Soon

1) We have a 10 person team - so we end up with a lot of stories in our sprint - we use the backlog view a lot so we can easily see all of the stories in the sprint - and move them around.  It would be really helpful to see the status of the story in the backlog (or have the ability to add a column to that view)

2) Additional Boards or filtering on a roadmap and backlog - We have multiple stakeholders (custom tag we use) that we work with and want to be able to filter by when we review the roadmap and backl.og stories with them - so we can review ones that pertain to them only.  There is no workaround for the roadmap and the workaround for the stories was to create a custom page with a filter gadget - but then we don't get the ability to move stories from backlog to sprints when we have those discussions.

Nice to Have

1) Ability to see the sprints across the top of the roadmap

2) Ability to color the epics, or show status of epics on the roadmap

Keep up the good work - looking forward to seeing more enhancements soon.

[Tim Takach]

Is there a way to show a roadmap from a collection of epics across various projects?

[Ian Sheffield]

@Kevin Bui - How do you define which statuses in epics constitute "To do", "In Progress", "Done".  We are trying to add additional workflow steps via statuses which show up in the board, but do not translate to the status filter on the epic roadmap.

I can't seem to find anyway to map which statuses are which.  For example:

To do = open / under analysis

In progress = in design / analysis complete / under review / in QA

Done = QA Complete / Closed

[Deleted user]

@Bree Davies . - I am stumped on two things with the next gen projects, which I have not seen documented yet for a future release. 

During traditional project setup I can assign a "Default Assignee", Project Lead, and project category. 

Is there still a way to do these?  We have a default lead engineer for each project, who assigns out stories as they are added to mission teams.  Right now, I am listed as the Project Lead and do not see a way to change this to reflect the lead engineer. 

Also, we are using category to filter our list of projects, by Active, Not Active, Archived etc.  Without a category, I cannot figure out the procedure to filter inactive projects from the master list. As a workaround, if there was a way to display a list for Category ISNOT Archive, that would also work for me. 

[Morris Coyle]

Is there any plan to add the option of adding Story cards to the Roadmap view?  This way we can get a Gantt style view of projects

[Russell Stanford]

For that matter please include an option to view Sub-Tasks as well as Story Cards in Roadmap View.