Behaviour of cross level dependencies

[Wessel Donkervoort]

Hi,

I was hoping that somebody can explain a little bit more about dependencies within Portfolio for Jira on different levels.

When a story has a dependency with another story it is straightforward: the algorithm will put the the story behind the other story. Only exception to this rule would be sprint assignment.

How does this work on higher levels? So for example on Epic or Initiative level? I tried this out but what I am seeing is that the algorithm puts the work in parallel. Does this have to do with the ranking of the stories?

Also; what influence does it have to create a dependency with a story and a epic?

Looking forward getting a bit more in-depth explanation here.

Thanks in advance!

[Earl McCutcheon]

Hello Wessel,

The main focal point is that the Dependencies will make it so an issue cannot start until the scheduled completion of the issue that it is dependent on by scheduling the issue into the next available sprint on Scrum or after the issue in kanban, and this is the same across hierarchy levels.

Where the visual representation of this may get confusing is that When the dependency is at the same hierarchy level say an Epics blocked by other epics, they will react the same as you would see at the Story level with dependent stories, and the dependent Epic and all child issues are scheduled after the completion of the Epic that is blocking it from starting, so epic-1 blocks epic-2 then the first story in epic-2 is scheduled after the completion of the last story in epic-1

An Epic is displayed on the timeline spanning the entire scope of the child issues within the epic (the Epic starts when the first child issue of the epic starts and ends when the last child is complete), so if you have a story in epic-1 that is blocked by a story in epic-2 both epics may span the same amount of time if the other stories in the epics allow for the scheduling to overlap fully, otherwise you will see an offset in the start time of the Epics if they only partially overlap if some issues in the first Epic come before all issues in the second epic.

If you add a dependency where a story blocks an epic then this will cause the Offset again either fully or partially.  If all issues in the epic are blocked by the story you get a full offset, or if only some then a partial offset.  exe if you have 2 epics with several stories in each and a story that completes in the middle of epic-1 blocks epic-2, then epic-2 will show as starting after the story is complete appearing as it is starting half way through epic-1 in the timeline, but if the Child issue in epic-1 that is blocking epic 2 is in the last sprint of epic-1 then epic-2 will show up scheduled after the completion of Epic-1.

-Earl