How to Consolidate a Full Hierarchy into One Swimlane in a Jira Board

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Why do we need to build a work item hierarchy in Jira?

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Modern systems are becoming increasingly complex every day as teams respond to growing demand and intensified competition. With the rise of AI, building sophisticated systems is no longer limited to large enterprises—today, small teams or even solopreneurs can create solutions that once required entire departments.

However, increased accessibility to complexity comes with a cost. To succeed in such projects, teams must maintain a clear view of the full picture while effectively managing scope and dependencies. Without this clarity, even the most capable teams risk being overwhelmed.

The ancient principle “Divide and conquer” is more relevant today than ever. It helps prevent teams from getting lost in a sea of tasks by breaking large, intimidating problems into manageable parts.

Translated into engineering terms, this means that any complex problem or project can be decomposed into smaller, more manageable sub-projects or initiatives. Each of these units can deliver independent value, and once completed, they can be integrated into a larger initiative. If those units are still too large, the process can be repeated—splitting them further into smaller, well-encapsulated chunks and introducing multiple levels of detail as needed.

This approach is deeply embedded in modern software development practices and tooling. A simple and familiar example is the Epic → Story hierarchy, which is often extended to Epic → Story → Sub-task. Another widely adopted model comes from the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), where work is structured as Epic → Feature → Story → Sub-task.

As a leading productivity and project management tool, Jira fully embraces hierarchical thinking. It allows users to define custom issue hierarchies in its settings, and these hierarchies are then supported across a wide range of Jira tools and views.

What are the solutions for consolidating work item hierarchies in Jira?

In Jira, there are several ways to consolidate and visualize work hierarchies.

The basic Epic → Story → Sub-task hierarchy is supported out of the box on standard Kanban and Scrum boards. Teams can work with this structure immediately, without any additional configuration or apps.

For more sophisticated hierarchies, users of Jira Premium can rely on Plans. Plans allow teams to expand the hierarchy beyond Epics and Stories, visualize it as a tree, and explore it through roadmap views. This makes Plans particularly useful for higher-level planning and cross-team coordination.

In addition, newer Jira products such as Goals and Jira Product Discovery help build hierarchies that start even higher—from Goals and Objectives down to key results and their implementation tasks. This approach works very well for strategic planning and tracking, where the primary focus is understanding overall progress and answering questions like “How close are we to achieving this goal?”

However, when we move from strategic planning to tactical execution, the needs change. For day-to-day tracking, delivery teams often prefer Kanban boards, where all relevant items are visualized within a single workflow. Ideally, such a board would show everything related to a specific feature or initiative in one place.

Having the board will also help to visualize dependencies and resolve them on a daily basis.

This is where a challenge arises. Standard Jira Kanban and Scrum boards support only limited hierarchies—either Epic → Story or Story → Sub-task. They do not support visualizing deeper or custom hierarchies directly on the board.

A natural first idea is to use JQL-based swimlanes. However, this approach quickly runs into another limitation: Jira does not provide native JQL functions to query an entire issue hierarchy. Without additional tools—such as add-ons like Adaptavist ScriptRunner—it is not possible to reliably extract and display full hierarchies using JQL alone.

So, are we blocked here?

Fortunately, no.

There is a Jira Marketplace app called Advanced Agile and Kanban Boards that addresses this exact problem. With this app, Jira users can create boards where swimlanes are automatically generated based on parent issues. 

Unlike standard Jira boards, these swimlanes can be configured to fetch and display the full issue hierarchy, not just the immediate parent-child relationship.

As a result, teams can finally combine hierarchical visibility with tactical Kanban execution—seeing all related work items grouped under their parent initiatives, while still benefiting from a clean, workflow-driven board.

How Full Hierarchy Is Built in Advanced Agile and Kanban Boards for Jira

The underlying logic is straightforward and deterministic.

First, a board is created based on a JQL filter. This filter defines the initial set of work items that the board will consider. Once the board is loaded, it retrieves all issues matching the JQL and identifies those that belong to the highest hierarchy level present in the result set.

For each issue at this top hierarchy level, the board automatically creates a swimlane. After that, it recursively collects all related child issues—direct children, children of children, and so on—until the entire hierarchy beneath the parent issue is fully encapsulated within the same swimlane.

Once swimlanes for the highest hierarchy level are created, the process repeats for the next lower hierarchy level. For each level, the board generates swimlanes in the same way, ensuring that hierarchical relationships are preserved and visualized consistently.

This iterative process continues until swimlanes have been created for all hierarchy levels present in the board.

Any remaining issues that do not belong to any detected hierarchy—such as standalone tasks or issues without a parent—are automatically grouped into a dedicated “Other” swimlane.

As a result, the board provides a complete, hierarchy-aware view of work items, combining deep structural visibility with the flexibility and clarity of a Kanban workflow.

 

Cool — I can see the full hierarchy now. But how do I navigate it and focus on the right level of detail?

That’s a great question.

While showing the entire hierarchy is extremely valuable for understanding the full picture, it can sometimes be too detailed for day-to-day work. Depending on the situation, we may want to zoom out to keep a high-level view (for example, at the Initiative or Epic level), or zoom in to focus on execution details (Stories and Sub-tasks), skipping higher levels altogether.

To support this type of navigation, Advanced Agile and Kanban Boards provides a simple but powerful mechanism: Hierarchy Level Quick Filter.

With this filter, you can limit what is displayed on the board and show only the work items that belong to a selected hierarchy range. This makes it easy to switch between strategic and tactical perspectives—without changing the board configuration or losing the context of the overall structure.

 

Conclusion

Visualizing the full hierarchy on a Kanban board is a powerful way to gain tactical control over the status of an entire initiative. This type of view is especially valuable for program and project managers who need to quickly identify impediments, understand their impact, and take proactive steps to resolve them. It also significantly improves cross-team coordination by making dependencies and blockers visible at a glance.

With Advanced Agile and Kanban Boards, this hierarchical view can be created easily and enhanced with additional capabilities such as dependency management and analysis of impediment reasons. These features are invaluable not only for day-to-day execution, but also for retrospectives and continuous process improvement.

If you would like to try this approach in your own Jira instance, you can follow the link below and claim a 30-day free trial. The application is available for both Jira Cloud and Jira Data Center.