Epics/stories in GitLab FOSS

Question

We have a self-hosted GitLab FOSS instance. This version does not include any epics/stories and there is build-in way to create hierarchy between issues.

We are migrating a project from JIRA. The team that worked on this project where using epics/stories and sub-tasks. Are there any strategies to handle epics/stories in GitLab FOSS. I mean I know we would have to use labels and/or milestores, but has anyone ran into this situation.

Also, I know GitLab Ultimate has epics, but it is too expensive.

Answer 1

Epic in GitLab are indeed part of the "Portfolio Management" feature (issue 3254) of the GitLab Ultimate edition.

The only free alternative would be to have "sub-issues", which are being discussed in issue 4588, and illustrate how you would need to use labels.

For instance:

All sub-issues must use the same prefix for their title, preferably a meaningful shortened version of the main issue's title if it's too long.
This is a visual helper to quickly identify sub-issues and their main issue.

Each sub-issue must have proper labels:

• the ~sub-issue label
• the same type label as the main issue
• the same release scoping label as the main issue
• the same priority label and severity label as the main issue
• the relevant specialization label to that particular sub-issue

This is still being implemented, with topics like "Provide first class support for Issue Task Lists and Tasks" (issue 2036).