Find the Jira epics blocked by another team
Checked against Atlassian’s documentation on 7 October 2026.
A team lead asks “which of our epics are blocked, and by whom?”, usually the week before a date. On Atlassian Community it reads “Task A (one team) → blocks → Task B (another team) … Multiple tasks might be waiting on a single epic … the visualization is lacking” (Community, July 2026). This page says how to find blocked work with Jira’s own search, why it misses most blocked epics, then what Blockline does.
What Jira does by itself
- Blocked is a link, not a status. Jira has no “blocked” state of its own: an issue is blocked when another issue blocks it through a link. Some teams add a Blocked status or a flag as well; neither says by what.
- Search finds linked issues. JQL’s
issueLinkTypematches an issue by the kind of link it has, andlinkedIssues()lists the issues linked to one issue. - Closing a blocked issue is allowed. The request to stop it, JRACLOUD-43369, and the request to search blocked and blocking issues properly, JRACLOUD-22024, are both open (read on 7 October 2026).
A search for blocked epics
The open issues that wait on something:
issueLinkType = "is blocked by" AND statusCategory != Done
The epics among them:
issueLinkType = "is blocked by" AND issuetype = Epic AND statusCategory != Done
Save the first as a filter per team, add the team’s spaces with
project in (STOR), and put it on the team’s dashboard. For one epic,
what it waits on: issue in linkedIssues("STOR-1", "is blocked by").
Why the epic search comes back nearly empty, and the first one too long:
- The links are on the stories. Teams link the story that waits to the story it waits on, so the epic itself has no Blocks link. The epic search misses it; the story search lists the stories without saying which epic each one holds back.
- A blocker that is done still counts.
issueLinkTypematches the link, whether or not the blocker is finished. Add the blocker’s state by hand, one issue at a time. - Dates are not compared. Blocked by something due next week and blocked by something due after your release look the same.
- The sides can mix. A link-type search matches the link type’s name
and both its descriptions, so issues that block others can come back
beside those that wait
(JRACLOUD-98637,
filed June 2026).
linkedIssues()with a key keeps the direction.
A dashboard helps a little: the Filter results gadget on the first filter, with the Parent column added, shows which epic each blocked story belongs to. It still says nothing about whether any of them will be late.
Getting from that list to “which epics will slip” means opening each story, its blocker and its epic, and writing the dates down.
With Blockline
Blockline is our app. It reads the same links and does those steps for every epic:
- Open any epic. Its Blockline group in the Details column, and the panel under View app actions, lead with its level and the reason: “At risk · Blocked by PAYC-3 via STOR-4, 13 Nov (due date), 6 days after this epic’s date”.
- Waiting on lists everything the epic waits on, including through its stories (“via STOR-4”), each with its status, date, assignee and the risk it brings. A done blocker reads “Done: no longer blocks anything” and clears the flags it caused.
- For every epic in a space at once, open the space’s Blockline tab: the count At risk or Blocked first, then each epic worst first, the reason on every row. Filter Risk to At risk or worse.
- Across teams, Apps › Blockline over the spaces you pick, a saved filter or JQL (Cross-team dependencies in Jira, without Premium).
What to do with a blocked epic is the same with any tool: talk to the team that owns the blocker, about that issue and that date. The reason names both, and Open blockers on the board says which teams to call (“3 · DATA, MAPP, PAYC”). If the answer is “we never started it”, the board will say so before the date does: a blocker still To Do within ten days (by default) of the date waiting on it is a Stalled blocker.
“Blocked” in Blockline means a circular dependency: two issues waiting on each other, which no date can fix. A blocker that lands late is At risk, one with no date or no owner is Watch. The seven rules and their levels are in How risk is judged. More on the Blockline home page.
