Dynamically find child items in one project based upon parent epics in another project - Cloud

Question

Our organization would like to create epics in one project that contain children (stories, tasks) that live in other projects backlogs. This would allow us to see all the pieces associated with an Initiative in a single Jira project.  I'm trying to determine a dynamic way to create filters for the parent project and the child projects without hard coding "epic links" or other ways to identify this relationship.

Example - Project A has epics that contain stories in other projects.

Epic A-1 has children:

Story AAA-1 (belongs to project AAA)

Story AAA-2 (belongs to project AAA)

Story BBB-1 (belongs to project BBB)

Story CCC-2 (belongs to project CCC)

I currently have a board filter for project A that looks like:

(issuetype=epic and project = A) or "Epic Link" in (A-1,A-2,...)

This allows the board to show all epics associated with project A and children associated with project A's epics. The problem is I have to hard code the "Epic Link" values to find the children.

I don't think I can solve this with native Jira, so I'm open to add-ons that might work. We are using Jira Cloud or other ideas to build this globally hierarchal backlog.

Petter Gonçalves · Answer

Hello Paul,

Thank you for reaching our Atlassian community!

I understand that you would like to build a query to return all epics associated with project A and children associated with project A's epics without needing to specify the issue key of the Epics, but perform a sub-query to select the Epics by projects or any other issue fields. Is that correct?

If I've understood you properly, you can use the subquery epicOfQuery provided by the add-on JQL Search Extensions for Jira. To search for Epics from project A, the query would be:

(issuetype=epic and project = A) or epicOfQuery = "project = A"

For more information on how to use it, you can check the documentation below:

- Subqueries for JQL Search Extensions

Let us know if this is the option you were looking for.