Create an Epic
For the project backlog, we start at the top of the issue hierarchy by defining epics.
Let’s return to the Mythical Misfits scenario for your project. In this case, the office manager has expressed two major desires for the Courtyard Improvement project:
Refresh the garden to be more appealing
Refurbish the patio to be more comfortable
These are rather large requirements and will need to be broken down in smaller requirements. At this level, though, the desires of the office manager will serve as epics in your project.
In this workshop, we will address the first requirement. Let’s create an epic for it.
In the top menu for Jira, click the big blue Create button.
This will open the Create Issue dialog. At the top of the dialog, confirm that that the project is “Courtyard Improvement” and select “Epic” as the issue type.
Next, let’s fill out the relevant information for the epic:
- Epic Name – Enter a short name for the epic that can be used a label. Let’s call it “Garden Refresh”.
- Summary – Enter a one sentence description of the epic. You can write you own, or use the short sentence provided by the office manager: “Refresh the garden to be more appealing”
- Reporter – Leave yourself as the reporter.
- Description – Although not a required field, a full description can help the team later understand more clearly what the intent is for the epic. This is not the place to break the epic into stories, however.
Click Create to create the epic. This will take you back to the project Backlog view, which looks…. empty. Where’s the epic?
To view epics on the project Backlog view, find the EPICS link that is sideways in the middle of the page.
Click on the link and the Epics panel will open.
To see the epic details, click on the “…” next to the epic name, and click View epic details.
This will open the full details page for the epic.
If you click on the Issues link in the left navigation section of the page, a panel listing open issues in the project will appear. There will only be one issue in the list right now, but this is a good way to find issues and display their details.
Now that we have an epic, it’s time to start decomposing it into stories.