Why Jira does not allow Epic--Feature--Story--Task Hierarchy which is scaled Agile structure

Question

Epic--Feature--Story--Task is the Scaled agile structure and JIRA , the most commonly used platform does not allow that.  It sucks that we need to create a level above in premium version and treat that as an Epic , and Epic as Feature. What is the best justification to this?

Dave Rosenlund (Trundl) · Answer

Hi, @Archana Keswani. Welcome to the community 👋

It's not really that surprising. Jira has been around much longer than SAFe and it embraced the Agile Manifesto Epic > Story > Subtask hierarchy long ago.

Luckily, because of Jira's popularity, there are multiple ways you can extend Jira to address SAFe and/or other hierarchies.

Atlassian offers Jira Align for SAFe and other scaled agile approaches. And the Atlassian Marketplace has a significant number of products that will help you use any hierarchy you'd like.

Here is an example search that shows some of the SAFe-oriented marketplace apps for Jira Cloud.  You could use the word "hierarchy" (instead of "SAFe") to expand the results to apps that let you mix and mingle Jira issue hierarchies as you see fit.

Hope this helps,

-dave

P.S. Full disclosure, I work for the company that makes Structure. You can/should adjust the search criteria as you see fit.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Jira was built as an issue tracker, and later brought in code to support Kanban and Scrum.  It has never been intended to be an Agile-at-scale tool, this came along a lot later than Agile (I've been working with Scrum and Kanban teams from before the Agile manifesto was written, and Jira + greenhopper was a natural fit for them).

Atlassian have focussed on Jira's core function of issue tracking, leaving other vendors to provide apps or even other integrative software to provide scaling functions.  Epic/story is useful for almost everyone who uses an issue tracker, sub-tasks are not scrum or kanban, but there because most people can use them.  Layers above Epics are only needed by people who want to scale up and do cross-project planning, so they're not implemented in the core of Jira - most people simply don't need them.