epic name not an option for card layout

[Lloyd Bullard]

I want to have epic names showing up in the issue card in JIRA. my team and I have previously used this feature in the on prem version of JIRA. 

I have followed several different sets of instructions from forum posts and official documentation, and I am unable to get the epic name to show up on the card for JIRA tasks. 

going into board settings>card layout then checking in the drop down list, epic name just is not there. 

this has worked for other instances of JIRA (both cloud and on prem) that I have used and is the way that all of the forum posts and help documentation suggest. 

help needed.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Lloyd Bullard 

Welcome to the community.

The name of the issue's parent epic should be displaying on the cards automatically without you having to add it to the card layout. That is my experience.

Are you not seeing that?

Can you provide screen images that show the card missing the Epic Name, and also the details of that same issue to show it is indeed linked to an Epic?

[Michael Harrison]

I think this is another example of the confusion between "Epic Name" and "Epic Summary". In our boards, "Epic Summary" shows by default, but we use "Epic Summary" as a longer, slightly more detailed description of the Epic. "Epic Name" is what goes into the little colored "chiclets" on all the other boards. But for some reason, when we make a board of epics, that's not allowed.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Michael Harrison 

Welcome to the community.

Without more information/screen images I'm not able to provide any feedback on your situation. What do you mean by "that's not allowed" in your scenario? You can't add the field to the card layout?

[Michael Harrison]

Yes, that's right. Sorry for the confusion.

We have a kanban board that only shows our epics. This is what a card looks like on the board:

The "Epic Name" is not displayed. Only the "Epic Summary".

Here's the epic issue detail, where you can see that the Epic Name is set to "Epic Name":

Here's the Card layout screen in the board settings, and there's no way to add "Epic Name" to the cards:

Optimally, the cards would have the same colored epic name label that shows up on any issues assigned to the epic:

Does that clear it up?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's because the Epic name field only exists on Epics.

Try adding Epic link instead.

[Trudy Claspill]

Are you working with Jira Cloud or Jira Server/Data Center.

I work with Jira Cloud, and the only time Epic Name is not displaying on the Epic cards is when those Epics are part of a Team Managed project. The Epic Name doesn't apply to Epics in a Team Managed project.

[Michael Harrison]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

I added "Epic Link" and it's showing as "None" on all of the cards.

Apologies for my confusion, but I'm not sure what you mean when you say "the Epic Name field only exists on Epics". The cards listed on the board are epics.

@Trudy Claspill:

This is Jira Server. I don't really know the distinction between Team Managed projects and other projects, or whether this applies to Jira Server.

[Trudy Claspill]

Team Managed projects are not available on Jira Server. The original poster tagged the post as "cloud" and "jira-software-cloud". If you are not using the same hosting type as the original poster, in the future I would recommend that you either mention that in your comment, or if you have a question on the same topic then start a new Question post that is properly tagged for your hosting type.

Epic Link would show as "None" on Epic cards because Epic Link is the field used in the child issues to store the Issue Key for their parent Epic. Epic Link is not a relevant field for Epics themselves.

I can't actually speak knowledgeably about what does and does not display on Jira Server/Data Center because I don't have access to such systems. I have access only to the Cloud hosted products.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

On Jira Server/Data Center, it's easiest to think of them only having Company-Managed projects.  They're pretty much the same on DC and Cloud.

In DC/CMP projects, there are three layers of issues to look at:

• Epic:  has only an Epic Name field
• Issue:  has only the Epic Link field  (Which almost always displays as the name of the Epic that is actually stored in the field)
• Sub-task, has neither field (they belong to an Epic only as part of their parent issue)

[Trudy Claspill]

Right, but ...

The card in @Michael Harrison 's image is for an Epic, and it does not show the Epic Name.

In my Jira Cloud Free instance the only time the Epic card does not show the Epic Name is when the Epic is in a Team Managed project.  For an Epic card in a Company Managed project in my Jira Cloud, the Epic Name is shown on the card. Therefore I would expect it to be shown on the Epic card in the on-premise product too, but it isn't, per Michael's image.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ah, no, I've just worked out what I missed.

It's a Kanban board.  They don't work with Epics, they treat them as though they are issues (so the Epic Name is not something that appears on the cards)

[Michael Harrison]

@Trudy Claspill Apologies. I didn't see those tags. I came across this thread via a Google search, and I'm not very up-to-speed on the distinctions between the on-prem and cloud versions of Jira. It sounds like we're still addressing the main question that @Lloyd Bullard asked, but I'm happy to open a new thread if we all think it'd be more helpful.

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- It is, indeed, a Kanban board. Is there a more effective way to create a "board of epics" within a scrum project where we can view the status of various epics, and have it include the Epic Name?

Again, thank you both for your patience and diligence in getting to the bottom of this.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I am sorry, but no, it's a bit of a pain when Atlassian get too strict on the "pure" definitions of Scrum and Kanban (my whinges include being able to see Epic names on boards intended for managing Epics - ok, not strictly Kanban, but they're useful, sub-tasks not inheriting sprints, versions, epic fields, and so on from their parent issues so we can report on them, and the complete lack of blocking people putting sprint estimate fields on sub-tasks)

The best I've done is to implement a third Epic specific field - a scripted one that says something like "all issue epic names" which is a copy of the epic name on epics, the linked epic's name on issues, and another copy of it on sub-tasks.  Just so we can run "all issue epic names = 'Bob'" and see the Epic, issues, and sub-tasks all in one list.

[Michael Harrison]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- Oh well! It was worth a shot. Thanks again for your help.

I think our solution may just be to use the same name for "Epic Summary" and "Epic Name", but we'll see.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Another thing I've always wanted - rid of the Epic Name field completely - it should be just the Summary (I know how it ended up that way, and it's a boring story, but the two should have become one years ago, Jira 7.0 at the latest!)

[Michael Harrison]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- I know they're frustrating, but deprecated dead ends like this are just signs that the software hasn't rested on any laurels. It's moving, and progress means that things get left behind.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Very much so. 

It's also something that lets people like my lot get a foot in the door - the "fix" that I tend to deploy that I described above is a doddle to do with one of our products!   

When I first ran into Atlassian, they'd just opened up the "plugin" framework so people could write things to add to it, and they had a handful of basic workflow functions that simply weren't enough for a lot of their user-base in the core of Jira.

People swooped in and wrote a few plugins that added functions.  Instead of doing what most companies do and push these vendors out of the marketplace, Atlassian embraced them, and actively avoided writing their own versions of them.   Of course, they have directly competed in areas, but mostly by acquisition.