Improved Backlog planning in next-gen with the epic panel!

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Community,

We know you love the Roadmap on next-gen, and we’ve heard a lot of feedback that you also want a better way to plan your Backlog… introducing the epic panel on next-gen!

Epics provide a way for teams to capture big rocks of work and allows them break these big rocks down into small pieces. They also allow teams to group similar existing work together for better visualisation and an easier way to communicate progress at a rolled up level. We know most of you are using some form of work breakdown in next-gen, and that you are experiencing some of the following benefits…

• Getting a better understanding of what work needs to be completed and helps your team plan accordingly

• Understanding the relative size of a piece of work based on all the steps needed to complete it

• Identifying gaps and reduce the risk of delivery or running over time because of unplanned work

• Prioritising team efforts more effectively and quickly reprioritise based on new information

What we’ve done with the epic panel is to make work breakdown a more efficient task for you. To add an issue to an epic, you can drag and drop the issue onto an epic in the epic panel. And to add multiple issues at once, simply multi-select any number of cards and drag drop those cards onto an epic. Adding a card, that already has an epic, to a different epic on the panel will change the epic.

Here are some other key behaviours you can play around with…

• The epic panel can be toggled on and off in the epic filter dropdown.

• The epics are shown in the epic panel in the same order as on your Roadmap view. It is also possible to change the order of epics by dragging and dropping the epic up and down the epic panel - please note this will change the order of the epics on the Roadmap as well.

• Epics have a progress indicator that shows the number of issues that have been completed, in progress, and that have yet to be started.

• The epic colour is shown to allow you quickly scan the list to find the epic you want. These colours are now consistent throughout the Roadmap, Board, and Backlog across web and mobile.

• Selecting an epic will filter the issues on the Backlog for that epic. Selecting multiple epics will filter the issues for all the epics selected.

• You can create a new epic inline in the epic panel by clicking the “+ Create Epic” button.

• You can view the full details for an epic by expanding the epic card and clicking “View all details”.

We’re keen to hear your feedback and make any improvements and changes that can help with your backlog planning.

FAQs

What's the difference between epics and other issue types?

• Stories, bugs, and tasks are used to describe one single piece of work, while epics are used to describe a group of issues that all relate to the same, larger body of work. Check out one of our Agile Coach guides for more info.

Why is the panel in my project named something else?

• Your team may have renamed the default epic issue type to something else (e.g. “Feature”) to match the terminology used in your business. All issue types can be renamed to whatever makes sense to your team in the Project Settings → Issue Types page.

Does this replace the Roadmap view?

• The panel doesn’t replace all the amazing features you have in the Roadmap, and is instead looking to compliment these existing features.

What if my team doesn’t want to use epics?

• We want your team to set next-gen up to suit how you work. If your team doesn’t find value in epics, then you can delete the epic issue type in the Project Settings → Issue Types page. Don’t worry, you can easily recreate this issue type at any time!

[Jimi Wikman]

So...you are basically making Epics into features or requirements?

This works well in a truly Agile setting, but most teams do not have the luxury of being a small, isolated team, so how will this fit into a Agile-Waterfall hybrid? Or Scaled Agile for that matter that also have the Epic level?

How about teams that have their requirement process outside of Jira (like in Confluence), how would they use this?

despite these questions it is a good feature though, so good work :)

[Eoin]

Thanks @Jimi Wikman - we're really looking to enable teams use epics in a way that best suits their circumstances (and for a lot of teams that means not even calling them epics). I'm assuming your questions are about work structure/hierarchy more broadly in next-gen as opposed to the efficiency improvements on this article. We're continuing to build out next-gen, and although right now we are focused on the single team use case; we do have plans in the future to cover multi-team and organisational level needs - supporting scaled agile as one example.

[Sebastian Obentheuer]

@Eoin Great Feature!

Some bugs / features:

1.) It would be great if it remembers the "Show Epic Panel" setting (when I switch to Board and Back it is closed again).

2.) Epic progress in the epic panel could also be displayed in story points like for the sprints & backlog (not started/in progress/done) for a better overview (e.g. from a grey progress bar i cannot see the number of issues/story points).

[Dan H]

Been over a month now since this was implemented (the panel is hidden/off by default, so many of us didn't even know about it) and I just want to reiterate the number one bug that makes this almost unusable...

1) Epic panel does not remain toggled on - simply refreshing or navigating away & back to the page will remove and turn the panel off, every single time.

Please fix this, otherwise us next-gen users cannot use the Epic panel properly!

[Eoin]

@Dan H @Sebastian Obentheuer thanks for your feedback - we'll move the panel to be driven by local browser storage rather than being a URL parameter. We're going to start working on it soon. Cheers, Eoin

[Dan H]

@Eoin ah brilliant, look forward to the fix :)

Thank you very much Eoin!

[Chau Vu]

Is there a way to hide an epic from the panel when it's complete? Also, it doesn't seem like the progress bar for the epic is working right now. Is this a bug?

[Beven]

Hi @Chau Vu welcome to the Atlassian community.

I am assuming that you are talking about the epic panel in a next-gen project (rather than a classic project).

One way to hide the epic in the panel is change it to “done” status. Also you will need to make sure all the children issues in this epic is done.

For your second question we were not able to produce your problem - perhaps you can raise a bug here https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/ and specify the exact steps to reproduce and take note of the issue type, which status that you are changing (before and after), does it happen with only one project, are other users getting the same problem etc. 

Looking forward to your response.

Thanks!

[Chau Vu]

Hi @Beven!

Thanks for your response. All the children issues, sub-tasks, etc. in my epic are marked as done along with the epic and I'm still seeing it in the epic panel so I think this might be a bug related to the other issue I mentioned re: the progress bar as well.

[Beven]

Hi @Chau Vu 

That is very strange indeed.

It will help a lot if you could raise the bug in the link provided at the top so that our support engineers can also take a look. They can log into your Jira instance if they need to do to see what the problem is. Please put as much information as possible and screenshots will help a lot as well (if you are no sensitive data).

Also it might be worth putting down whether you are using next-gen scrum vs next-gen kanban and if the issues are in an active Sprint vs Future Sprints.

In the meantime I will do a bit of quick investigation to give us any clue on why you might be having this issue.

Thanks again and have a great weekend!

[Beven]

Hi @Chau Vu 

We have raised a ticket for the issue https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-20741.

We have put down what we think you did in the "steps to produce" but let us know if you are doing something different.

Regarding the progress bar, are you able to create a ticket in the same place with steps to reproduce and other information like whether it is happening all the time, is it happening with other users, etc.

Thanks!

[Alexandre Planta]

Hello!

Im still lookin for a way to "re-order" my epics based on a field(in my case `ORDER BY priority DESC, status DESC`).

I known it's possible to do it manually but it's important to me have the option to "reset" the sort if needed.

I even tried to understand how the rank field works but seems like a global hash and not seems very friendly to make a script to work them.

Anyone find some solution around that?

Thanks in advance! :)