Add Object between EPIC and Story

Question

Our group wants to add an object between EPICs and Stories called Feature.

Our leadership wants to see stories belonging to Features and Features to Epics with all the same functionality JIRA offers.

Want to be able to see Features from the Backlog view just as you do stories, tasks and bugs

If possible want to be able to expand Features in backlog view.

Any ideas?

Mousa Mitwasi · Answer

I agree this would be a good feature (no pun intended) to have.  In large organizations where multiple teams support an Epic, creating one Feature for each team that encompasses their stories helps with organizing and managing the work by each team.

Brent Walker_pvd4r1 · Answer

Trudy, thanks for your reply and clear answers.  Yes I have tried to add "Feature" as you suggest and actually found out what you stated.  Guess there is no good option.  I cannot believe others are not wanting to insert new object types to the hierarchy with added expand/collapse functionality from within the backlog.  This is a major feature for Product Owners.  The backlog is where they live and it has limited capability for them.  Sure would be nice to see Atlassian add more capability for the role of Product Owner.  Seems out of the box it is geared towards service management not Scrum Product Owners which I would guess is a large user base of JIRA.

Thanks again for your response and that saved me a lot more trial and error.  For us Third Party option pricing makes this option not viable.  Given the pricing model applies to "all" licenses not the subset of users that have the role of Product Owner.  A pricing model that queries on role would be very beneficial here and more inline with reasonable pricing for a third party module.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Brent Walker

The default issue hierarchy is

Epic
|-- base level issue types (story, but, task, etc)
    |-- subtask level issue types

You could add another issue type at the base level and name it Feature, but the functionality applied to it would be the same as is applied to other base level issue types. You could use the generic issue linking to link Stories to the Features, but Jira would not see that as a parent/child relationship the way it does for Epics and base level issue types.

If you wanted Jira to support a parent/child relationship between Features and other base level issue types, you would need to either upgrade to use a Premium subscription plan, or look at using a third party product that enables the expansion of the issue hierarchy.

Even with the Premium subscription, in the Backlog the Feature issue would not be expandable.

You would only see the hierarchical relationship if you created a Plan using the Advanced Roadmaps features available in the Premium subscription.