Can Jira allow for multiple task levels?

Question

I'm looking for a project management tool that will allow multiple levels of tasks and subtasks, that can roll-up to a higher-level status.  Is Jira limited to just Epic / Story / Subtask?  I see that Premium allows the administrator to edit the hierarchy, but I was hoping for flexibility at the user level.  For example, I would like to track a system assembly with several subcomponents, where each subcomponent could have tasks or additional subcomponents with tasks.   The depth of the hierarchy is variable, not pre-determined. How would I best approach this in Jira?

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Hi @Sandra Vaquerizo,

welcome to the community!

As already mentioned, Jira Premium allows additional hierarchy levels on top of epics.

Alternatively, if you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, there's a number of hierarchy-focused apps available that offer even more freedom. E.g., you may want to have a look at the app that my team and I are working on: JXL for Jira.

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. These issue hierarchies can be based on Jira's built-in parent/child relationships (like epic/story, or story/sub-task), and/or based on issue links of configurable issue link types. As issue links can be established between any pair of issues, this gives you almost complete freedom over the hierarchy you want to model. (While I wouldn't recommend it, you could even model sub-sub-tasks, if that's something you're after.)

This is how it looks in action, for a 5-level hierarchy:

I should add that JXL can do much more than the above: From support for issue grouping by any issue field(s), to sum-ups, conditional formatting, or inline bulk editing via copy/paste.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

Rahul_RVS · Answer

Hi @Sandra Vaquerizo

Welcome to the community !!

For creating a hierarchy per project/user you can use Issue Links to create a hierarchy and not impact others. However I believe you will need a mktplace app to visualize and manage the same. If you would be interested to try one out do take a look at

Issue Hierarchy

In the video below, we have a "New Issue" type which is being set as a parent of Epic using issue links.  Similarly you can have any issue type above/below other issues. The app has multiple other features including roadmaps which are very useful in project tracking and management and is free for upto 10 users.

(Disclaimer: I work for RVS, the vendor for this app)

emre_sxsdh5 · Answer

Hi @Sandra Vaquerizo ,

I would like to tell you about our alternative solution for the feature you want. Create subcomponents and assign them to issues and search the parent subcomponent or folder with our custom JQL function and find the child issues to which the child components are assigned. Our application is Software Configuration Management Toolkit  .

1- Create your Subcomponents Hierarchy(You can also add component into another component).

2- Assign your component to an issue with using our custom Subcomponent Version Picker Custom Field(If you want you can assign component with JIRA's components field). Example issue summary:

3- Write our custom JQL function subcomponentsOf then see your child issues. Below, the first input is the key or name of the project and the second input is the compressor folder. In the subcomponentsOf function, it calls the children of the compressor folder and their children and finds all sub issues. You can also use this function for components and their subcomponents.

4- You can also see the assigned component's hierarchy and assigned versions on issue view screen.

Disclaimer: I work for the vendor who developed this application.