How do I introduce 5 levels of hierarchy?

Charu Jain

We have initiatives->epics->tasks->subtasks.

We want another level to group initiatives. I saw somewhere that features (that are at task level) can have children that can further have subtasks as children. That would have solved our problem, however, I cannot create non-subtasks children for my features. 

Can you help me solve our 5-level problem? Appreciate a quick response as we are blocked on this.

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Charu Jain 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

In a Premium subscription (as you have tagged your post) at a Global level you can define an Issue Type Hierarchy. By default the hierarchy is:

Epic (level 1)
|-- standard level issues (level 0) i.e. Story, Task, Bug
    |-- sub-task level issues (level -1)

When you create a new issue type by default is is added to level 0. It is possible to create new sub-task type issues at level -1 also. It is not possible to directly create a new issue type at level 1.

However, with the Issue Type Hierarchy you can move level 0 issue types above level 1, creating a new higher level issue.

Note that this is a global setting. You can't define different hierarchies per project.

This sort of change can be made only by a Jira Product Admin.

The documentation about it is located at 

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/configure-the-issue-type-hierarchy/

An issue type can have as its children issues only in the level directly below it. An issue type can have as its parent only an issue type from the level directly above it.

Note that you can have multiple issue types at each level. If you want to allow your Feature issue type to have children that can then have Sub-tasks, then the Feature issue type would have to be added to level 1, alongside the default Epic issue type.