I want to identify all Epics where "work" has started

[evangelopanagi]

Therefore, "List all Epics with Children that have a status not in (backlog or to do)"

I've had a look at a few options, but don't get to what i need, which is ultimately a query to identify if any work within the epic has started. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @evangelopanagi 

Are you working with Epics in a Company Managed project or a Team Managed project?

Jira does not natively provide a search function that will return multiple Epics based criteria applied to the child issues in them. Refer to the JQL functions available natively here:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/advanced-search-reference-jql-functions/

Do you have access to third party apps that extend the JQL capabilities, or is it possible for you to get such? There are third party apps that would enable you to execute such a query. 

For example the Adaptavist Scriptrunner app supports using a function called epicsOf with a subquery to select the child issues and then get the parent Epics for the selected child issues.

https://docs.adaptavist.com/sr4jc/latest/features/scriptrunner-jql-keywords-functions/jql-functions/epic-functions

[evangelopanagi]

Company Managed project - I've seen that plug-in from other support answers, but no we don't have it and the path to obtaining may be harder than coming up with an alternative. 

Massive thanks for the response and the links @Trudy Claspill 

[Trudy Claspill]

An alternative to consider that does not require a third party app would be to use a custom field added to the Epic issues to keep track of child issues where you consider "work has been started". You could use an Automation Rule to update the custom field in the Parent Epic when the Status of child issues changes. Then you could filter for Epics based on that custom field. You might use a numeric field to "count" the child issues where work has started, and when it is set to a non-zero value then those are the Epics that you want to find.

[mauricio.groth]

Hi @evangelopanagi 

As you're on Jira Cloud, the correct answer is to get an app that provides JQL extensions you're looking for.

With standard JQL, you can only get a list of issues and export them to Excel for further processing. This works if you want to do a one-off analysis. If your use case is more dynamic than that, look beyond standard Jira.

Standard JQL doesn't easily allow it, but you can quickly find the results using our professional indexing service JQL Search Extensions

You can use this query to find all Epics with Children that have a status not in (backlog or to do)

issue in epicsOfChildrenInQuery("status not in ('to do', backlog)")

Check out the documentation for more examples.

If you have any other questions, please contact our support. We’ll be happy to help you!
Best regards,
Maurício

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @evangelopanagi

just to add to Trudy's answer, another option might be to look into one of the more hierarchy-focused apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. These apps typically provide their own ways of narrowing down your data based on parent-child relationships between issues. I can only speak for the app that my team is working on - JXL for Jira - but here, finding your epics would be quite simple:

• Create a so-called sheet in JXL that contains all your epics, plus any potential child stories that are in progress. Don't worry about the parent/child relationship between epics and stories; JXL will sort this out for you.
• In JXL, enable the default issue hierarchy; that's a one-click action.
• In JXL, hide all "empty" epics; that's again a one-click action.

The remaining list of epics are the epics that have at least one child story in progress. You can now use JXL's issue editing and -analysis capabilities to work on these epics, or trigger various Jira actions, or export them to e.g. Excel for further processing.

This is how this looks in action:

Hope this helps,

Best,

Hannes

[evangelopanagi]

Thanks @Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira - looks like a useful plug-in!  I was ultimately seeking how to do this to ensure my automation was working appropriately without having to search for single epics - but look at ALL epics in one query. 

I'll have a look at paths to plug ins here... see where that gets me.

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @evangelopanagi, just to clarify, you don't need to search for single epics - e.g., in my little clip, I used the following JQL statement:

((issuetype = "Epic") OR (issuetype != "Epic" AND status = "In progress")) AND project = WORK 

This means that all epics of project "WORK" are considered. You can, of course, drop the project = "WORK" clause, or use any other clause instead.

Any other questions just let me know!

Best,

Hannes