Epics

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. For details see Multi-level child epics.
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

Version 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

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