I use Gitlab Premium in a large company, where we self-host for various reasons. Because we self-host and have our own process and tools for security checks, etc. in our software, we will never jump to use Ultimate.
I believe Child Epics as a feature should be available in Premium for the following reasons:
- Epics should naturally be broken up into children for child groups as a way of simply tracking the work at different project group levels. Any service level that has child group capabilities should have child epics.
- Child Epics fits with other premium features well and would entice more people to move from free to Premium.
- Child Epics doesn’t really fit in with the key features of Ultimate (servers to run CI/CD, security checking, etc.), and feels like just an effort to add more stuff to Ultimate to entice people to pay more. However, if a company wants to evaluate their own verification and security tools, I can’t believe they will choose Ultimate, which feels more for smaller startups or companies that want to offboard all that work to focus on core development only. Child Epics won’t sway them one way or the other.
Having all the other Epic and Issue features, but not Child Epics makes it difficult to manage large projects across multiple teams in an organization that has multiple levels of groups in Gitlab. This feels like a glaring miss in how this feature has been assigned to the service levels.