Epic Dependency Reports to Help Prioritize and Plan Feature Development

An epic dependency report shows the relationships and dependencies among all issues for a single Epic.

Teams need to understand dependencies in order to prioritize and plan feature development. You'll need to see what issues will block others especially if stories in an Epic are being worked on by more than one team.

Jira does not provide reporting out of the box that shows dependencies. As organizations scale to multiple teams, you'll need a report that shows cross-team dependencies for a single Epic.

VisualScript can create a report that shows dependencies for all issues for any selected Epic even if that Epic spans multiple teams.

The report displays the selected Epic as the anchor issue. The center row includes all issues linked to the Epic. The bottom row shows the issues that are blocking the issues in the center row. The top row shows the issues the issues in the center row are blocking.

This report can answer:

• What are the issues within an Epic?
• What are the statuses of all the issues within an Epic?
• What are the dependencies (even across different projects) of the issues within an Epic?

To generate an Epic Dependency Report using VisualScript, you'll need VisualScript installed on your Jira instance. Once VisualScript is added to your instance, you can add a VisualScript gadget to your dashboard. When the VisualScript gadget is added to a dashboard, you'll see a list of available reports to run. The built-in reports will be in a folder called "Built-In Reports".

Choose "Jira Epic Dependency" to add to your dashboard.

You'll be asked to provide an issue key for the Epic you want to center this report around and the type of dependencies or links you want the report to focus on, for example, Blocks, Duplicates, Relates, Clones. By default, "Blocks" will be selected.

The report will show all the issues linked to the selected Epic in the center row. The bottom row will show the issues that are blocking, while the top row will show the issues being blocked. There are colored dots in each issue which represent their status: to do is blue, in progress is yellow, and done is green.

While VisualScript offers a turn-key, no-code solution that will work out of the box for many teams, you can also easily make adjustments to create a custom report.

VisualScript comes with a built-in SDK that makes it easy to generate custom reports that fit your teams' needs. We even have friendly engineers who will help you get started.