How to establish parent link for issues below Epic level to establish SAFe hierarchy?

[Manuvimal Mohan]

I would like recommendations on how to create a SAFe compliant story hierarchy. I have read through few other questions where there have been suggestions to rename Epic issue to Feature and create higher level issues. 

I have done following changes to facilitate this issue hierarchy:

1. Rename standard Epic type to Feature issue type.
2. Created a new issue type and named it as Epic. Placed it above Feature type.

These changes helped me created following roadmap, but this comes with few issues:

1. As I ended up renaming Epic to feature, throughout my backlog Feature issue type is just treated as epic and this leads to confusion and inconsistency.
2. Jira uses Epic link to establish parent child hierarchy between Feature and Stories in my hierarchy. This means it doesn't use the Parent Link.

Bottomline:

1. I want to setup my hierarchy as Epic -> Feature -> Stories -> Sub-tasks.
2. I have followed the steps mentioned above to get to there but this has resulted in reusing the Epic link to simulate parent child relationship between Features and Stories.
3. Epic -> Feature link in the above setup in Advanced Roadmap uses Parent Link.

Summary: Is there better way to do the SAFe hierarchy?

[Daniel Capizzi · Accepted solution]

Hi @Manuvimal Mohan - welcome to the Atlassian Community!

The way that you've set up your hierarchy is the correct way to practice SAFe in Jira. As you've noted though, this works well in Advanced Roadmaps but not so well in Jira.

I'm happy to report that we're currently working hard on features to address these exact shortcomings you've mentioned, so that:

1. When you rename an Epic, that name is correctly reflected throughout the product, and
2. The concept of Epic Link and Parent Link will be unified into a single "Parent" concept for all levels of the hierarchy.

You can read more about the changes on our blog post here: Upcoming - Rename ‘epics’ in your company-managed projects.

These changes aren't yet ready to be released yet, but you can keep track of the status on our public roadmap, and any updates will also be posted to the blog post above as well.

Hope this helps! The team here know how much being able to practice SAFe in Jira will help, so we're really eager to get this shipped.

Cheers,

Daniel

[Manuvimal Mohan]

Thanks @Daniel Capizzi for validating my approach.