Visual overview of related and blocked issues?

[Johan Bromander]

Sometime we have situations where we have a lot of dependencies between stories on our board (including bugs and tasks). I find it hard in JIRA to get a good visual overview of how deep the dependencies are sometime. For example a story is blocking one issue which in turn is blocked by two other stories. 

Are there any tools or plugins that enhance JIRA in this matter? Or any other suggestions (hidden functions in JIRA?)?

And I'm not looking for methods or tips on how to avoid dependencies between stories/bugs/tasks.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Accepted solution]

Although I am not particularly familiar with these, there are multiple apps for Jira that visualizes the issues and the link between those.

These are visualized as a graph, where the nodes represent the issues, while directed edges represent the links.

You should check out these (in my suggested order):

1. Link Hierarchy
2. Issue Links Viewer
3. Pathfinder

[Johan Bromander]

Thanks a lot Aron! This was exactly what I was looking for. 

[Numeric Oasis]

We built Astrolink to solve exactly this — it's a Jira Cloud app that renders an interactive star map (force-directed graph) of your issue links, right inside the issue panel. You can explore links up to multiple levels deep, filter by issue type and link type, and click any node to navigate to that issue. It works with all link types including blockers, relates-to, Confluence links, and more.

Marketplace Link: Astrolink

[Walter Buggenhout]

Two suggestions on this matter:

• Scriptrunner extends JQL search capabilities to allow searches on linked issues
• Portfolio for Jira has a dependencies report, but just as part of its global portfolio management capabilities

Apart from those, there's quite a few options available on the Atlassian Marketplace: Linked issue apps on Atlassian Marketplace.

[Johan Bromander]

Thanks Walter. We'll probably tryout Issue link viewer.