Cross-project issues not showing children on Plan view

Question

For clarity sake:

Project Name is bold and underlined

Issue Type is italicized

Field Name is bold

"Plan Name" is quoted

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My set up:

Project: IT has the following issue types:

* Epic
* Story

Project: Dev has the following issue types:

* Epic
* Story

Project: Initiatives has the following issue types:

* Initiatives

I am trying to add the Epics from IT and Dev as children to an Initiative I created in Initiatives so that I can create a Plan that Shows me the hierarchy of:

* Initiative
* Epic
* Story

I am doing this based on this article. However, I can only assign Epics as children of Programs.  And I can only assign Programs as children of Initiatives.

In the mean time, to get this working, I renamed the Initiative project to Programs, and assign it the Program issue type, and removed the Initiative issue type from that project.  I have also added the field Parent Link to Epics and have linked all my Epics within the Dev and IT projects to a single Program in the Programs project.  All Epics from multiple projects share the same parent Program.

I create a new Plan called "Programs" with the following Issue sources:

* Project = Programs

The hierarchy shows:

* Hierarchy = Program to Story

However, I can only see the Program.  I cannot see the Epics or Stories.  If I add the following Issue sources it works:

* Project = Dev
* Project = IT

However, There are many Epics and stories in these two projects I do not want to show on this board.

My requirements are as follows:

* One Plan to show all Programs within the Programs Project and all children, recursively (Epics and Stories)
* Do not show any issue that is not a child (or grandchild) of a Program

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My Questions:

Is it expected that I can only add Epics to Programs, and not be able to add them to initiatives?  Everywhere I read states you can link Epics to Initiatives.

How do I do achieve my requirements on the Plan?

Richard Johnson_nvo3up · Answer

Hey Walter, thanks for taking the time!

Looks like we have too many cooks in the kitchen.  Some other Admin configured the hierarchy, so it is what it is!  I'll just know that going forward to add Epics to Programs, and Programs to Initiatives.

You had said, "If you want to limit the issues you import, create saved filters in Jira first to limit the selection to just those issues you'd like to see in the plan."

We have scriptrunner that helps me build filters to find specific Epics based on a sub-filter, and all children of those Epics.  It uses the function IssuesInEpics().  However, I do not see how to emulate that functionality by getting Programs and all children of those Programs.  How would I go about doing this ?

-----EDIT-----
I think the following filter works:

issuekey in portfolioChildIssuesOf(PROG-1) OR issuekey = PROG-1

However, this does not let me say "Give me all Programs where custom field = XXX and all children issues of those programs.

Do you know how to do this?

Walter Buggenhout · Answer

Hi @Richard Johnson,

Thanks for the extensive explanation! What I am missing, is how you set up your Issue hierarchy (Plans > Settings > Advanced Roadmaps Hierarchy Configuration).

If you want the hierarchy to be like this:

* Programs
* Initiatives
* Epics
* Stories
* Sub-tasks

This is the place where you make sure the right issue types are at the right levels.

Next, when you create a plan, you do need to import all the issue sources that contain your issues at every level into your plan.

Basically, from your example you'll need to import data from these projects:

* Programs
* Initiatives
* Dev
* IT

However, if you use projects as your issue sources, this will indeed import all issues in those projects. If you want to limit the issues you import, create saved filters in Jira first to limit the selection to just those issues you'd like to see in the plan. Then, replace the entire projects with those filters as your data sources.

Hope this gets you on the right track!