Link of child stories to each other for same feature

Question

Hi ,

We have a parent feature and it would have child A and child B(stories) and we would link each other child as child work item as is relates to.

ie Child A should have Child B as linked work item and similarly Child B to have Child A.

I have currently created automation rule but seems the child stories are not getting interlinked. Can anyone suggest how to achieve this.

Regards,
Suma

Marc -Devoteam- · Accepted Answer

Hi @Kustagi Suma

Work items of the same type are on the same level and can only be linked linear, they can't be linked in a parent child realtion.

See issue linking; https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/link-issues/

Also please provide your current automation setup with detailed information about the stepes and the audit log information

Paul Glantschnig _Appfire_ · Accepted Answer

Hi @Kustagi Suma

This should be definitely doable with automation — the trick is getting the rule to look up the sibling stories correctly, not sure if this is your problem though.

The most reliable approach is a rule that triggers when a child issue is created (or linked to a parent), then looks up the other children and creates the links:

Trigger: Issue created (or "Issue linked" if you're adding children after creation)

Condition: Check that the issue has a parent: {{issue.parent}} is not empty

Look up issues: Use the JQL parent = {{issue.parent.key}} AND key != {{issue.key}} — this finds all sibling stories under the same parent, excluding the current one

For each: Create link → "relates to" between the trigger issue and each looked-up issue

A couple of things to watch out for:

If you're using issue links (e.g., "is child of") rather than the built-in parent field to model the Feature → Story relationship, the JQL in step 3 needs to change. The parent = JQL only works with Jira's native parent/child hierarchy. For issue-link-based relationships, you'd need a different approach — potentially a "Related issues" branch condition instead of "Look up issues."

Jira won't create duplicate links, so running this on existing stories is safe — it'll skip links that already exist.

Make sure the automation has the right scope (project vs. global) to see all relevant issues.

One other thought — if the reason you're cross-linking siblings is to see which stories belong to the same feature, you might not need explicit links at all. If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, JXL for Jira lets you set up a hierarchy view where all child stories appear nested under their parent Feature in a tree structure. You'd see at a glance which stories are siblings without maintaining "relates to" links between them.

Disclosure: I work for the team that builds JXL.

Cheers, Paul