How do you handle outdated Epic's with incomplete stories?

[Tayla Anniciello]

Hi Atlassians! 

We are trying to tidy up our list of epic's and product backlog, as we have a couple of epic's and stories that are no longer relevant due to a product vision change.

Some stories within these epics are complete and others are not. We would like to keep the Epic's and stories for historical and referral purposes but want to remove them from the backlog. 

Our Jira administrator suggested creating a project and moving these irrelevant epics to that project but I am not too sure if this is the best practice? Any suggestions would be highly appreciated. 

Thanks

[Inactive Stephen · Accepted solution]

Hi @Tayla Anniciello

For redundant stories, I find resolutions work well - with one team, we had:

• Positive Resolutions: Done, Fixed, etc
• Negative Resolutions: Duplicate, Won't Do, Cancelled, etc

^ We also renamed the "Done" status to Closed - relying on resolution to confirm reason for closure. This saved us having additional statuses in the "Done" category.

For the Epics - I would consider you need to close them as "not done" - these Epics have completed work within them. If you used the method above you could close the stories as de-prioritised and still mark the Epic as Done.

An alternative would be to have an "Incomplete' or "Partial Done" resolution for Epics which are only partly delivered?

Ste

[Chris Johnson · Accepted solution]

What we do is create a status for outdated or abandoned epics and stories to remove them from active consideration but keep them in the system for easy historical views and potential reopening down the line. An "abandoned" status or something similar can be added to the Workflow with the "Done" category so that it doesn't show up in the backlog but doesn't go away from Jira (you can just search all stories by that status).

That's our methodology and we find it to work pretty well.