Epics

DETAILS: Tier: Premium, Ultimate Offering: GitLab.com, Self-managed, GitLab Dedicated

An epic in GitLab describes a large body of work that can be broken down into smaller parts. Epics organize issues and features into a high-level theme or goal.

When issues share a theme across projects and milestones, you can group them by using epics.

You can also create child epics and assign start and end dates, which creates a visual roadmap for you to view progress.

Use epics:

• When your team is working on a large feature that involves multiple discussions in different issues in different projects in a group.
• To track when the work for the group of issues is targeted to begin and end.
• To discuss and collaborate on feature ideas and scope at a high level.

Relationships between epics and issues

The possible relationships between epics and issues are:

• An epic is the parent of one or more issues.
• An epic is the parent of one or more child epics. Ultimate only.

%%{init: { "fontFamily": "GitLab Sans" }}%%
graph TD
accTitle: Epics and issues
accDescr: How issues and child epics relate to parent epics
    Parent_epic --> Issue1
    Parent_epic --> Child_epic
    Child_epic --> Issue2

Also, read more about possible planning hierarchies.

Child issues from different group hierarchies

• Introduced in GitLab 15.5 with a flag named epic_issues_from_different_hierarchies. Disabled by default.
• Enabled on GitLab.com in GitLab 15.5.
• Feature flag epic_issues_from_different_hierarchies removed in GitLab 15.6.

You can add issues from a different group hierarchy to an epic. To do it, paste the issue URL when adding an existing issue.

Roadmap in epics

DETAILS: Tier: Ultimate Offering: GitLab.com, Self-managed, GitLab Dedicated

If your epic contains one or more child epics that have a start or due date, a visual roadmap of the child epics is listed under the parent epic.

Related topics

• Manage epics and multi-level child epics.
• Link related epics based on a type of relationship.
• Create workflows with epic boards.
• Turn on notifications for about epic events.
• Add an emoji reaction to an epic or its comments.
• Collaborate on an epic by posting comments in a thread.
• Use health status to track your progress.