Display components in a similar fashion to epics.

Question

Our teams currently organize items into epics, and prefer all items to be in epics. Over time, this forces some items into epics which don't require one, but are there simply for the organizational/metadata/viewing ability the epic affords it.

Components seem to solve that problem by providing a way to place all jira items into containers that are non-closing and meant to represent themes or similar work.

When viewing the backlog or the active sprint board, it's nice and easy to see epics, they're displayed inline, they're color coded. Components however are relegated to simply being grey text displayed on a new line, making your beautiful backlog bloated and thick.

Does anyone else use components for this and wish they could more easily see the component displayed, similar to how epics are displayed. Specifically when viewing them in backlog view, and active sprint view?

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

... and just thinking outside the box: My team and I are working on an app named JXL for Jira in which you should be able to achieve most of the things you are looking for - just not directly in the backlog and sprint view.

This is how it looks in action:

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a number of advanced features, including support for (configurable) issue hierarchies, issue grouping by any issue field(s), sum-ups, issue ranking, or conditional formatting. All these play nicely with both epics and components - so depending on your exact use case, it may be worth a try!

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Hi @Joey Alain

I'm not aware of a way to change the appearance of components. The content of the backlog and sprint view are also areas where Marketplace Apps are provided with only very limited integration points, so it's unlikely that an app can help with exactly what you're looking for.

If you are on Jira Premium, you could consider creating an additional issue type (like Category or something) and mapping this issue type to the epic level - however, IIRC, this still wouldn't be shown as expected in the backlog and sprint view, although I believe this is planned for the future.