what is an epic in jira

An epic in Jira is a large body of work that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories or issues. It is essentially a large user story that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories. Epics are used to describe a group of issues that all relate to the same, larger body of work. They are a helpful way to organize work and create a hierarchy, breaking work down into shippable pieces so that large projects can actually get done and value can be shipped to customers on a regular basis. Epics can encompass multiple teams, multiple projects, and can even be tracked on multiple boards. Unlike sprints, scope change in epics is a natural aspect of agile development. Epics are almost always delivered over a set of sprints, and as a team learns more about an epic through development and customer feedback, some user stories will be added and removed to optimize the teams release time. Epics are a special issue type in Jira that can be created by users, with associated fields, screens, and a workflow. They have special custom fields with a unique issue linking feature that creates a hierarchy between issues in which the epic is the ‘parent’ issue of multiple ‘child’ issues. The most powerful feature of epics in Jira is the ability to integrate them directly into the planning process with the Epic panel in the project’s backlog.