Auto update epic start/end based upon contained stories and sprints

[David Roberts]

Is there a way (or can I create a feature request) to allow automatically adjusting the epic timeframe as seen on the roadmap view to reflect the start/end of all the contained stories? 

Second wish, can it have breaks as opposed to just start/end.  

For example: MyLongEpic

•    Stories:
  • Mystory1 starting now, ending in 2 weeks (sprint 1)
  • Mystory2: starting only in sprint 3 (skip one sprint)
  • Mystory3: ending in sprint 4

What I would love to see is, in roadmap view a broken bar showing MyLongEpic and start/stop when any work will be done on the contained stories.  

I know someone will say, but that's not really Agile (preplanning sprints in advance) and I realize but I have always found it helpful to tentatively put stories into future sprints even knowing they can change up until sprint start.  It gives me some idea of work done and gets better as we progress through a release.  

Thanks

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi David,

It is possible to have Jira Cloud automatically change the due date of the epic in the manner you describe.  But in order to do so, we would have to use the project automation feature to make this work.   I should also noted that this doesn't base itself off the sprint dates either.  In my setup I had to make sure that my stories had the Due Date on them as well.  My default project only had that field for the Epic, not stories.

I tested this out in my own team managed project.  If you are a project administrator, you can go to project settings > Automation and then create a new rule.  You can setup your rule to look like this.

• Trigger when field value changes on Due Date.
• Condition Issue type does not equal Epic (We don't want to run this automation when manually setting an epic's due date)
• Condition Compare two values.  If {{TriggerIssue.Due Date}} is greater than {{issue.epic.Due Date}}
• Then you need a Relational Branch - select Epic
• Then Action of Edit Issue.  Which you can set to copy the value from the trigger issue to the Epic.

With this rule, anytime any child issue in the epic has increased the due date beyond the epic's due date, the epic will automatically adjust to match it.

As for your second ask, I don't see a way to make the roadmap behave in that way.  Nor have I been able to fine a feature request seeking to do something similar on our public issue tracker.  I'm not sure I understand this part sufficiently to help with that part.  Perhaps you can change the status of the Epic itself to a status such as "On Hold" if it's not actively being worked on.  This might help to at least let other users see the status of that epic if it's not currently being worked on.

Andy