Epics

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

When issues share a theme across projects and milestones, you can manage 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.
graph TD Parent_epic --> Issue1 Parent_epic --> Child_epic Child_epic --> Issue2

Also, read more about possible planning hierarchies.

Child issues from different group hierarchies

History
  • 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

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.

Child epics roadmap