How can I give my story a child issue?

Silvia Escobedo Davila

So I work on the marketing team for my company. I am trying to help us utilize JIRA. I have sort everything like a research paper. Our many topics would be App, Website, Social Media, etc. I have labeled these as Epics within each epic for example in Partnerships I have added stories and I have used each partner's name for a story. Now I am trying to add child issues under those specific partners. Is this possible?

 

PARTNERSHIPS (EPIC) under that EPIC we have PARTNER ABC (STORY) child issue would be Provide Branding Kit to Partner.

Two questions in this, would I be able to have child issues that way or do I need to approach this Project in a different way? Ideally I would like to be able to show them this way

Jack Brickey

Hi Silvia, welcome to the Community. I'm trying to internalize your scenario but struggling with fully understanding. Let me start by explaining a bit about how Jira is organized to see it it helps you figure out how to approach your specific use case. Let's start with some basic terms and such...

• Projects - Jira uses projects to act as a means of grouping/collecting related items. In the world of product development a Project often equates to a Product. In business use cases a Project might be a team, e.g. Marketing, HR, Facilities, etc. However, it could just as easily be an actual project w/ a beginning and an end, e.g. Marketing Campaign XXX.
• Issues - within a Project you have issues (Atlassian's term for the individual bits of work). These issues can have pretty much any name you wish but OOTB you have: Epic, Story, Task, Sub-task (and others depending on the project template used). While you can create your own issuetypes, they still fall under either Epic, Story/Task, Sub-task category. Moreover the relationship between these is Epics have underlying Stories/Tasks and Stories/Tasks may have sub-tasks. Note there are solutions using different variations of Atlassian products that introduce a level above Epics (Initiatives) but let's not go there. An Epic is big piece of work that will be delivered over time and it may be that some of the Epic never gets done for whatever reason. An Epic is sort of like a project w/in a project and they should have a beginning and end unlike many projects themselves. Stories should me medium to small chunks of work that are rather self-contained and most often but not always belong to a single person. If a story needs to belong to multiple people it must be broken into sub-tasks to ensure ownership/accountability/control.

Disclaimer - Jira is flexible and some of the above is my interpretation vs. hard and fast rules but it provides you w/ a framework of understanding.

now with that said, going back to your use case I am struggling w/ the following:

PARTNERSHIPS (EPIC) under that EPIC we have PARTNER ABC (STORY) child issue would be Provide Branding Kit to Partner.

On the surface this doesn't seem granular enough but I don't pretend to understand you use case. I would think maybe the following might make sense...

Project = Partnerships

Epic per partner

Story/Task would be the "provide branding kit"

Sub-tasks might be the smaller pieces under the task when needed.

The reason I say this is that it seems like you will 'run out of rope' otherwise and you will come across a sub-task that is too big and needs to be broken down further and you would be stuck.

Just my $0.02