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Hi Priti,
(As far as I am aware), what you've described isn't available directly in the Backlog or Active Sprint view. If you would like to view linked work and whether the sequence makes sense, you have a few options natively in Jira:
1. For Epic level work only, you can use the Timeline view in the Project view for some basic planning capabilities. You can visualise links (blocks/blocked by) in this view.
2. For all levels of work, you can use the Timeline view in Plans (available in Jira Premium). This feature allows you to visualise dependencies between all levels of work. You can also filter for specific dependency chains in this view.
https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/get-started-with-advanced-roadmaps/
3. For a more dependency related view, you can use the Dependencies view in Plans. This allows you to map out all the dependencies in the work included in your Plan.
4. For the most Active Sprint looking dependency visualisation, you can try using the Program view in Plans, that will automatically visualise any off-track dependencies in the work to be planned.
Hope you can find an appropriate visualisation from these suggestions. Otherwise, I'd recommend raising a feature request over at jira.atlassian.com to, for example, filter on a particular work item with its entire dependency chain.
@Mendel Liang That is really good information to have, but I feel that it's lacking depth. It covers stories that are blocked, but what about things like:
{story5} is related to {story1}
or
{story6} is caused by {story4} and {story4} is waiting on {story3}
Etc.?
Here's a real world example I ran into just today:
Several weeks ago, we discovered a blocker for Story-936. So, we made Story-962 and marked it as a blocker. Easy enough.
Today, during re-testing, we found out that additional work should have been done for 936, but was missed! Internally, we decided that the thing that was missed is important, but for the sake of the release, it's okay to push the missing part(s) back to a later release. It's not a blocker but...work should be done in the very near future, and it relates directly to a high priority story we're paying attention to. We absolutely need to keep close track of it.
In turn, we made Story-973 and Story-974. Both stories were marked as "is a child of" 936. Complicating matters, 973 also has to be completed before 974 can be started - 973 makes the thing, 974 configures the thing. Two different people, two different departments.
So, the dependencies are something like this:
- 962 blocks 936
- 973 is a child of 936
- 974 is a child of 936
- 973 must be completed before 974
What I would expect to see then, is something roughly like:
Is anything like that possible using Plans (or some other area of Jira?) I know I've been able to see a list all stories as a series of line items in Search using JQL, but... it's not the same. If you're trying to show to management what's going on, listing off random strings of numbers isn't going to give them a good idea of how to approach things. Graphics help hammer home how easy or hard it will be to get done, or what delays they should plan for ahead of time.
As is, all I can see is: 962 blocks 936, which isn't really hinting at the depth of the issue, or how many other stories are connected into it.
And to be clear: this isn't an uncommon event, either. We make a lot of stories for a lot of projects, for a lot of clients, across multiple environments that we manage. Things get missed and problems are discovered late into a release cycles. If we find a reoccurring problem or something, we might end up linking in 8 or 9 stories, or have multiple "follow-up" stories that require documentation, or weird niche events.
Having a way to show visually what is in the way of each story, and what other work has to be done after the story is done would be incredibly really helpful.
As is, we use flow charts or whatever, but if Jira can render this automatically, it would save us a ton of time.
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