How do I bulk link user stories to a feature?

[Ian Court]

Hello,

I have several hundred user stories that are linked to an epic and I now want to link them to newly created features within the epic rather then the epic itself.

Existing: Epic -> story 1, story 2, story 3 etc

Required: Epic -> feature 1 -> story 1 ... story 50

                Epic -> feature 2 -> story 51 ... story 100

                etc

If I go into the feature & click on the link issue button I have to manually enter all of the user story numbers and when they are moved the watchers & reporters will receive emails which is what I want to avoid.

Is there any way to bulk link user stories to a feature that will enable me to suppress the update emails?

Thanks,

Ian

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Ian Court 

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

How did you create that issue hierarchy?

Are you using the Jira Premium subscription, and modified the system level issue hierarchy configuration?

Or did you simply create another issue type named Feature, and now want to use generic issue linking to link the Stories to the Features?

Are the Features and Stories in the same project?

Are you an Administrator for the project?

If so you can accomplish this through an Automation Rule.

If you are not an Administrator for the project, you would need to work with the Project Admin to construct the rule.

If the Features and related Stories are in different projects, you would need to work with a Jira Admin to construct the rule. Only Jira Admins can make rules that operate on issues in multiple projects.

You would need to be able to come up with a JQL that could select all the Stories that you want to link to a given Feature.

You could use a Manual trigger for the rule, assuming you need to run it only once.

You would add a For Branch / Related Issues / JQL step and enter the JQL for the first set of Stories that you want to link to a given Feature.

Nested under that branch you would add an Edit Issue action. Within that action there is a More Options section where you can uncheck the box that says "send email"

You could add additional For Branch steps for each Story/Feature set.

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Ian Court,

welcome to the community!

I understand that you're using issue linking to model your issue hierarchy. I would normally recommend to check out Jira's built-in bulk editing wizard, however to the best of my knowledge, it doesn't support issue linking.

This being said, if you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, I think you'd like the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. You can also bulk-edit all your issue fields via copy/paste - including, of course, an issue's issue links.

This is how it looks in action:

You can also use JXL to view your issues in hierarchy - i.e., with epics on top of features on top of stories - based on their issue links.

(On a meta note: Along the lines of what Trudy said, I would also recommend to check out Advanced Roadmaps if you haven't yet. AR allows modelling any number of hierarchy levels *on top* of the default epic/story/sub-task hierarchy. To implement your exact hierarchy, you would either want to adapt your terminology, or rename the "Epic" issue type in Jira, which I believe you can. Since AR is part of Jira Premium, using AR is arguably the more "future-proof" way of working with extended issue hierarchies, as I assume that AR's issue hierarchy configuration will expand to other parts of Jira over time. JXL, of course, works great with AR, too :))

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Ian Court 

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

How did you create that hierarchy? Are you using the Jira Premium subscription and modified the issue hierarchy at the system level? Or did you simply create a new issue type called Feature at the same level as Story, and make the Feature issues children of the Epics?

Are the Features and Stories in the same project?

Are you a Jira Administrator for that project?

If so, then you could create an automation rule to accomplish this. You would need to be able to formulate a JQL to select all the issues that you want to link to a given Feature. In the Automation Rule you can run that JQL to select all the stories, then use an Edit Issue action to link the stories to a specific feature. In that Edit Issue action under the More Options section there is a checkbox you can uncheck to suppress sending emails.

There are a couple of different ways to accomplish the retrieval of the Stories. You could use the For Branch / Related Issues / JQL option. Nested under the branch you add the Edit Issue action - that action will run against all issues returned by the JQL for that branch. Then you can add another Branch for with the JQL for the Stories for the next Feature.

If you are not an administrator for the project you would need to work with the Project Administrator to create the rule.

If the Feature and Stories are in different projects, then you would have to work with a Jira Administrator to create the rule. Only Jira Administrators can make rules that operate on issues in multiple projects.