Advanced Roadmaps and How Epics Display Child Issues

[Jonathan Lowry]

Hello Everyone,

We are in the process in upgrading our Jira Instance to Premium and have been utilizing the Advanced Roadmaps functionality. In doing so, we ran into a scenario that could use some assistance:

Setup:

• We have a Project - "Project A" - that has an Epic.
• Under the Epic, we have child Issue Types of Tasks and Stories.
• Some of these child issues are in a different Project - "Project B" -  so they have a different Project Key.
• Advanced Roadmaps is configured to use the Boards as the Issue Source and is grouping by Project

End Result:

• We can see the Epic listed under "Project A",
• We can also see the Epic's child issues that were created in "Project A".
• We do not see the Epic's child issues that were created in "Project B".
• When we look under the "Project B" section, we see the "Project A" Epic with the "Project B" child issue.
  
  

Question:

• Why do the "Project B" child issues not show up in the "Project A" section under the Epic in order to get a complete view of the Epic?

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Jonathan Lowry,

From your description, it seems you have your plan grouped by Project. This is essentially just a way of viewing your issues.

Advanced roadmaps just displays the issues hierarchically. If you would remove the grouping, you would see the issues only once, neatly organised as parent issues with their respective children.

However, as soon as you introduce a grouping level (by project) in your view, your issues are displayed based with the project they belong to. This grouping starts from the lower level issues, as they are the ones that actually get worked on (Epics and issues above are usually just there to create structure, they don't get assigned to sprints normally)

Hope this clarifies!

[Jonathan Lowry]

Much appreciated, @Walter Buggenhout !  It does make sense, though it is unfortunate.

I am curious, is there not a way to configure the roadmaps to accomplish a view that is grouped by Project where the Epics for that Project show all of its children, regardless of where they reside?

Otherwise, we are not getting a complete picture of the Epic when grouping by Project.

I suppose another way to approach this would be to have all of the child items under "Project A", and then assign them to other projects based on a Component/Label. This scenario would introduce modifications to the other project's board, which is something we are trying to avoid.

[Blaise Rey-Mermet]

Two years later - I share @Jonathan Lowry comment. I try to group items of an advanced roadmap by components.  Having the child issues listed with their grouped parents would make much more sense. 

Or at least giving us a way to choose what is gouped and what is not. 
Thanks @Walter Buggenhout for the explanation anyway. 

[Danno]

@Jonathan Lowry, I tend to use filters in Advanced Roadmaps for this purpose. In my case, I will have Initiative at the highest level in my hierarchy. From there I link the Epics that are needed for that Initiative regardless of the project similar to what @Derrick L  explained. I've done this where the Epics are in different projects and are made up of issues from more than one project. I've also used a project as my highest level in a plan where that project holds all of the Epis issues and the children are still spread across multiple projects. Both have worked for me as our organization has changed over time.

[Derrick L]

You can add Project B (or the Board) in the Issue Source so it shows up.

[Jonathan Lowry]

Thank you, @Derrick L !

However, we are showing Project B in the roadmaps as well. This is where we see the stories that were assigned to that team.

Our problem, is that we do not see these same stories listed under the Parent Epic under Project A in order to get a complete picture of that Epic.

[Derrick L]

I added TESTPROJ and BCTESTPROJ projects in my AR, and I see it under the epic. Do you have any exclusion rules enabled?

[Jonathan Lowry]

We do not have exclusion rules enabled, as we are using the "Boards" of the projects to bring in the data, and those boards have Filters which already exclude unwanted items.

I believe the difference from your test scenario, and what we are seeing, is that we are grouping by "Project".  If we group by "None", then we can see all of the child issues under the Epic, even if they are in another project.

It may be just how the roadmaps are constructed as Walter mentioned in his message - grouping starts at the lowest level. 

I wish there was a way to fine tune the configuration so that all of the Epic's child issues would display under that Epic regardless of grouping.