It would be nice to be able to track dependencies between Epics at the Epic level (not from one story in one epic to another story in another epic). One way is to create a zero point story within the epic and link one epic to that, but that extra step makes it more cumbersome. A direct Epic to Epic link would be useful from the relationship section.
by: Steve H. | over a year ago | Product Planning
Comments
Agree. Enterprise scale Agile projects involve management of a larger and typically more complex set of Epics. These do have upstream, downstream, and co-dependencies. Given both Feature Group as well as Upstream/Downstream dependencies are attributes of Story assets, tracking these during the planning phase requires manual workarounds - ie.e. typically creating placeholder stories that carry this metadata for the Epics.
Given Epics are now first-class assets, a better approach would be to allow for Epic-to-Epic relationships as part of their attributes.
Given Epics are associated one-to-one with Projects but not iterations, automatic dependency status might use project start and end dates as measure of relationship state.
Agreed. With multiple teams contributing to a product delivery, dependencies at the story level are far too granular.
Sometimes when you are starting out all you have is epics. At that point you still know where there are dependencies. I'd like to use the dependencies to be able to view epics in a roadmap-like way from a sequencing stand point. You can create road maps manually but our road maps tend to start with epics so since VersionOne already supports epics it seems redundant to have to manually input them into a road map. I foresee using the Epic Timeline in conjunction with Epic dependencies (e.g using Visualize the same way it show dependencies in BIs) for planning.
in addition... I'd like to see the dependencies for epics displayed in the epic timeline.
Setting dependencies at multiple levels in a hierarchy can end up getting pretty confusing. However, seeing the interdependencies at higher levels can be done without creating hierarchical confusion. The Fall '14 release has a new epic dependency visualization to address this aspect.