What is an epic?
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An epic is the default work type your teams can use to capture a large body of work — performance-related work, for example — in a release. It's essentially a large user story that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories.
An epic can span more than one space if multiple spaces are included in the board where the epic is created.
Unlike sprints, scope change in an epic is a natural aspect of agile development. Epics are almost always delivered over a set of sprints. As a team learns more about an epic through development and customer feedback, some user stories will be added or removed to optimize the team’s release timing.
There may be differences in how epics are displayed and configured between scrum and kanban boards — especially if you're using the kanban backlog in a kanban space. See Managing epics in a scrum space and Managing epics in a kanban space for more info.
View an epic's work items
You can use the parent field in JQL to search for an epic’s work items. If you’re using older filters that rely on the Epic Link field, they’ll continue to work, but you should use parent when creating new filters.
Find out more: Advanced searching
Need help? If you can't find the answer you need in our documentation, we have other resources available to help you. See Getting help.
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