Why does the Timeline show children issues but the Kanban Backlog does not?

[Brandon Carmo, bcarmo]

The project has a Kanban Board and Backlog (not Scrum). The Timeline view shows the Epics and children issues however the Backlog does not show the same relationship.

The Backlog did show the Epic -> Subtask relationship but doesn't show the Epic -> Story relationship. In some cases it might but not in all.

See the screen shot where UDST-53 shows the children stories in the Timeline and Backlog, but UDST-40 does not. 

The only filter criteria in the Backlog is the Fix Version but all the children issues have Fix Version selected too.

I've tried some quick filters to group the Epics and their Children but they do not work either. Unless there is a jql format that I'm not aware of.

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Brandon Carmo, bcarmo and welcome to the Community!

Kanban backlog and list views are just different views, serving different purposes. So yes, they behave differently. Backlog views have never displayed the hierarchical relationship between epics and their child issues.

Since epics are usually container issues that normally don't move through the board (like their child issues do), you may be able to display those in the epic panel of your kanban backlog. To do so, navigate to the Board configuration, and on the Columns page select the option to display epics in the epics panel:

While that does not visualise the hierarchy similar to how the list view does it, it will remove the epics from your backlog and allow you to filter child issues by them.

Hope this helps!

[Brandon Carmo, bcarmo]

Thanks, Walter. I appreciate the explanation and suggestion.