Epics

Version history

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

Roadmap in epics

Introduced in GitLab Ultimate 11.10.

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

Permissions

If you have access to view an epic and an issue added to that epic, you can view the issue in the epic’s issue list.

If you have access to edit an epic and an issue added to that epic, you can add the issue to or remove it from the epic.

For a given group, the visibility of all projects must be the same as the group, or less restrictive. That means if you have access to a group’s epic, then you already have access to its projects’ issues.

You can also consult the group permissions table.