Provide Project Level Epics
Summary
The inability to group issues within a project into Epics has been identified as a significant barrier to efficient project management and has been a "show stopper" for some companies considering migrating to GitLab. Users have expressed frustration with the limitation of Epics being only available at the group level, highlighting the need for project-level Epics to streamline roadmap planning and feature tracking.
Current workarounds, such as using milestones or creating unnecessary subgroups, are deemed inefficient and time-consuming, underscoring the demand for a direct solution.
Implementation Reference
✅ Making Epics available at the project level - as of 2024-05-29 this is available behind a ff
1. The following guidance is from this slack thread:
we have a fixed policy check for each type we want to create, so allowing the creation of project level epics would be as simply as adding the create_epic ability to the project policy. In the future I think we want to move away from these type checks in favor of checking permissions at the widget level
2. Making Epics available in the left Nav
tbd
3. Ensuring project-level epics are available in roadmaps, boards and other views
tbd
4. License considerations
- Epics being available at the Project Level should be available to Premium license type.
- Noting that nested epics will continue to only be available for the Ultimate license type.
5. Feature availability / release timing
We will introduce this new feature shortly after the initial launch of the new work item-powered Epic experience, following its successful deployment and stabilization in production.
Customer Feedback
- "Why are Epics set at group level? They should be available at project level."
- "When I'm conducting roadmap planning and backlog grooming, I want to group issues within a project into similar buckets, so that I can easily track longer term features."
- "This feature is a show stopper for my company (15p) to migrate from Jira to Gitlab Starter, although Gitlab is our main code repository (community). I just created an account to follow this single issue and would love to have a due date in order to organize ourselves."
- "Would love to see this, I think it's really important. Having epics at the group level has the added complexities of promoting project-level labels and sometimes creating an ad hoc subgroup for just a single project."
- "We have exactly the same problem. If you come from the free version, it's even worse. Groups have to be created afterwards and all the namespaces have to be moved. Premium should actually save us time and not cost us a bunch of time in the first place."
- "I'm looking to move all my teams from Jira but this is an annoyance. I don't want to wrap every project in a group just to get epics for that project."
- "This is a feature we are also looking forward to use. Currently we are using milestones as a bit of a clumsy workaround. Would be great to have project level epics instead."
- "I have a monorepo with multiple products in it so epics would be really useful for us, but not at the group level. We currently just use issue linking and have an epic label that we use to communicate this, but obviously misses out on the extra features of epics."
- "Agreed, creating a group just for one project seems is somewhat annoying."
- "Was confused epics are on a group level and not on a project level, this would be a nice addition."
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