What is the difference between "Epic" as issue, and "Epic/Theme" as a field in an issue?

[Tal Rotem]

Although I would expect the latter to be a pointer to the first, i can't see the Epics I have created through "Create Issue" in the pull down of the Epic/Theme field (Which can optionally be shown inside an issue in edit mode).

My current conclusion is that they are not the same thing, and that the similar name is just a confusion. I assume that the Epic/Theme field is more like a free label, and is not shown in the Issues table as an Epic created via "Create Issue".

Is my understanding correct? do we have here 2 different Epic entities with no correlation between them?

[jhammons · Accepted solution]

Please see:

• http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/GH/Working+with+Epics

I believe that will explain the correlation. If you feel that document could be better organized or more thorough, feel free to leave a comment on it.

I hope that helps.

[Anna Agafonova]

Can't find anything on the topic of themes from the wiki. We are migrating our "ongoing" issues from a scrum board to kanban, and we are going to miss epics as a way to categorize loosely related issues. Should we stick to labels, or is there a Theme concept that could be used too? We don't really want to use "Components", because something as "resilience improvements" or "stabilizing tests" is hardly a component.

[Shrek Ding]

It generally just works "out of the box" (having enabled the GH scrum template to the project)

Some things to check

• Check the Epic/Theme custom field to ensure it is actually there (in the list of custom fields , JIRA Administration>Custom Fields) and that it is enabled for the specific project you are looking at (or globally)
• Check the Card Styles in the Project Configuration to add the Epic/Theme field to the Card/Summary/Line formats AND that this is done for all the card types you will be using within an Epic

In JIRA (eg the Default display screen) custom field don't generally appear (even as a label) unless there is a value for that custom field which gets created via the issue edit screen or some other way like the GH cards entry