Ticket Hierarchy on Jira Cloud

[Jerome Soucy]

Morning Atlassian-ites(?) :)

I've been searching for a solution but could not find a compelling answer in the forums and online so far so, at the risk of asking a question that may have been answered but I failed to see it, I want to define a specific ticket structure: Epic->Feature->UserStory->Task. Alas, the only ticket I can use as a parent is Epic. I picked my brain to see how I could add that structure but... all points to it not being supported... is that the case?

I mean, the hierarchy of tickets is a baseline to lock the structure and not have tickets that end up where they do not belong and I fail to see how I can implement that...

Any insights?

Oh, yeah, I don't have access to plugins from Marketplace... this is my client's Jira and I can't add/remove plugins willy-nilly :)

[Staffan Redelius]

Hi @Jerome Soucy and welcome to the community!

In Jira free, and Standard plan Epic is the highest level and the hierarchy is limited to three levels.

- Epic (level 1)
- Story, Task, Incident etc. (Level 0)
- Subtask (Level -1)

It is not possible to add additional levels between Epics and Stories

If you upgrade to Jira Premium you can add additional levels above the Epic level. What you need to do in that case is to rename the Epic to Feature and create a new level above Level 1 called Epic.

I have helped some customers who has the hierarchy Initative->Epic-Story->Subtask by creating the issuetype "Initiative" on level 0 and use a specific link-type (Realizes<->Realized by) to define the relationship.

It does not create a hierarchy in true sense but you can at least find what Epics are related to a specific initative. 

So, maybe not the answer you were looking for but i hope this can give you some alternatives to  explore further.

Best regards,
/Staffan

[Nikola Perisic]

Hi @Jerome Soucy 

Did you look into the out-of-the-box Work item hierarchy? You can only add the levels TOP of the Epic, not below it. For everything else, yes, you would need plugins from the marketplace. 

[Florian Bonniec]

Hi @Jerome Soucy 

Indeed the JIRA hierarchy cannot reflect the one you want.

The hierarchy is defined in the Work Type hierarchy section from bottom to top:

Sub-Task

Story

Epic

You can then add other level on top of Epic but cannot update the base on the hierarchy.

Using another hierarchy will prevent your users to leverage some jira feature so I always recommend to stick with what Atlassian has implemented.

In case, a custom hierarchy is really needed, the solution I use is Structure but it's an app.

Regards