Organize tasks on planning & task board

[sindhoor pangal]

Is it possible to view all the tasks, grouped by the Epic, on the Planning and Task Boards? Currently the only possible grouping seems to be a nested view of tasks and sub-tasks on the Task Board. But, I don't want to convert all of my tasks to sub-tasks, because then they don't show up in sprint planning on Greenhopper. Any suggestions?

[Renjith Pillai]

If you click on the Epic/Theme Name in any card in the planning board, it opens up a new window with all the Stories that are associated with that. Will that help?

An additional point. Sub-tasks are meant to be team tasks, so it does not make sense to change Epics and Stories to sub-tasks.

[sindhoor pangal]

Yup, aware of the Epic Window. What I was looking for was more of an overview, where the entire company, across functions can get an overall view. We are planning on mounting a large screen on the wall, with a Task Board for the entire company to know how much we have pending to the run up to our release. So, a Task Board or Planning Board, where the tasks are grouped under Epics will definitely organize it better for this cross-functional usage of JIRA

[Renjith Pillai]

Okie. Eventhough you original question is unresolved, just an additional hint for large screen displays.

https://plugins.atlassian.com/23983

[Beth Schaefermann]

I wasn't aware of the Epic window. I learned something new today. :) Thanks!

[Ian D]

Frankly I found the Epic task type rather useless, and instead disabled it in favor of grouping related Stories by epic using the Epic/Theme TAG. This way you can also use, say, Heatmap gadget on dashboards of the Epics/Theme's which you can drill down on.

And then, if we nedeed more info/documentation (say, Story Mapping ... and at the Epic level), it was better to do that outside of Jira ... in a wiki, pin-board, etc.

[Beth Schaefermann]

You could do it, but you would, as you assume, have to convert your Tasks to Sub-Tasks.

Then, you can view them in Greenhopper, you just need to adjust your planning board configuration to view them. It's possible that you have "Show Sub-Tasks" turned off. If you turn that option on (in the bar of buttons), the sub-tasks should appear subordinated to the parent issue.

[sindhoor pangal]

Sub Tasks don't see to show in Greenhopper sprint planning. Sub-tasks seem to inherit the sprint of the parent task. Is there a way I can change this?

[Beth Schaefermann]

Working with an assumption that you have a relatively low number of Epics, what if you created a special dashboard that has Agile gadgets that use filters that are focused on specific Epics? The filter might look like: "Epic/Theme" = EPICID-1

[Beth Schaefermann]

I played around with this a bit and got weird results on this filter. The Agile Gadget shows no data, but the two on the right illustrate the progress being made on the epic:

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B2gWnl__ODJNNnQ3WmxVRWNUMldzRlN6dHhyd0xSZw

If you did it this way, you could do three epics per dashboard:

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B2gWnl__ODJNZXNHSEJmdDZSa1dpOGY5OWl6UGRMUQ

[sindhoor pangal]

Yeah, this will work for a high level view of extent of progress. But if you want a complete view of all the tasks that remain to get to launch, then you need something like the planning board or the task board. But there are far too many tasks to make much sense for anyone viewing it. So, I want to group the tasks by Epics, to help people understand better the context of the tasks

[Beth Schaefermann]

While I realize this still doesn't meet the specific request, what about an Epic-based context?

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B2gWnl__ODJNbXRjcFpPYzZSRXk4OGtzdnlQemthZw

I figure what you might actually be looking for is an Epic-embed the same way you see stories and tasks in the screencap I linked, but I don't personally know of that view. I scanned the feature requests in the Greenhopper project but didn't see one that related. Maybe consider logging one and linking to this conversation?

https://jira.atlassian.com/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?mode=hide&requestId=32030