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How do I get Portfolio to respect the existing hierarchy of issues?

Dale Cieslak

Before using Portfolio, we created a "master" project and linked all of our other projects to it. For example, the MASTER-1 feature has Issue Link (is parent of) to the different parts:

MASTER-1 This is a feature

"is parent of" -> DES-1 Design for MASTER-1

"is parent of" -> CLI-2 Frontend work for MASTER-1

"is parent of" -> BACK-3 Backend work for MASTER-1

We thought Portfolio would be a great way to visualize all of the dependencies in one place, but when creating a plan, MASTER-1 has no child issues in the Scope view. I can manually recreate those issue links, but we have LOTS of issues so that would be a real pain. Is there any way to get Portfolio to automatically show the children? Even if I set MASTER-1 to be at the "Epic" hierarchy level, the children only show up for true Epics. I kind of feel cheated if this doesn't work...what's the point of being able to define the hierarchy if it doesn't respect what's already there?

I'm also kind of surprised no one else seems to be having this problem. Thoughts?

Comments

unknown

You need to configure Portfolio (not just the plan) to use the hierarchy you want. Directions are here (note that you need to be a Portfolio admin): https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiraportfolioserver/configuring-initiatives-and-other-hierarchy-levels-802170489.html

Dale Cieslak

Thanks, Steven. I am a Portfolio admin, and I did that before I asked the question. Portfolio correctly displays my "MASTER" issues as Epics, but all of the child issues show as "Issues without parent Epics" which doesn't respect the "is child of" / "is parent of" links from Jira. I really don't want to recreate the relationships manually given the size of our Jira projects.

unknown

OK, two questions.

What type of issues are MASTER-1, DES-1, CLI-1, and BACK-3? Are they all Epics, or mix of Epics and Stories? Something else?
Are you relying on this specific type of issue link "is child of"/"is parent of" when linking those issues?

Dale Cieslak

1. None of them are actual Epics in terms of Jira issue types. They're all Stories/Tasks/Bugs/Custom issue types (that is, non-Sub Tasks). In Portfolio's hierarchy, the issues I want to be the parents are defined as "Epics", while the others are defined as "Stories".

2. Yes. If Portfolio cannot distinguish between link types, I wish it would at least ask something like, "I see all these linked issues, want to make them children?"

Igor Sereda [ALM Works]

Hi Dale,

I think Structure add-on may help here a little bit. Structure integrates with Portfolio (supports the Parent Link custom field) and can build hierarchies both from issue links and/or from Portfolio links.

I apologize for shameless plug under the Portfolio topic, but I understand that the problem is not currently solvable by Portfolio. And you may need to use Structure just once to mass-move issue links to a Portfolio plan or vice versa, without the need to purchase a license.

So the way I see it could work is by using Structure's automation feature, which constructs hierarchies based on rules. For example, one can define an "extend" rule based on "is parent of" link to place children under respective parents. The rule can be bidirectional – so if you make updates to the hierarchy in Structure, the corresponding links are created or deleted.

The same works for hierarchy built from "Parent Link" relationship. So my thoughts were that we can build a hierarchy out of links in one structure, define another structure with Parent Link, and manually copy/paste the whole tree from one structure to another. Or maybe one would need to copy a selection of Epics and place it under initiatives.

Let me know if you'd like to explore this variant and I can try to record more detailed instructions for this case.

Kind regards,
Igor

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