Order of operations for including epics and stories in a roadmap

[Verna Lewis]

Let me say up front that we have recently upgraded Jira from data center 8.18 to version 8.22.3, so it is not clear how that affects the issue I am describing. The roadmap Configuration process has changed significantly with v8.22.3 - teams and releases are now separate tabs whereas they used to be a part of the Configuration process. 

I am working to understand the hierarchy of how Jira selects the stories and epics to be included in a roadmap. I have numerous teams/boards and releases that are included in the roadmap, but the content that I want to see is tightly defined by a Jira filter.

However, I end up with hundreds and hundreds of stories in the "Issues without parent" list, and I think this happens because of selecting all of the teams and their pertinent releases. This causes a lot of manual work to either 1) find an isolated story that should be included in the plan so that you can "drag it up" to display properly (somewhere above the "issues without parent line") or 2) to perform the "remove from plan" action to have a cleaner view or the roadmap.

So, I am wondering...

1.  Can I make the roadmap based solely on a filter without having to select teams/boards and associated releases? I have tried (unsuccessfully) to do this, so I think the answer to this is "no," just confirming that I am not missing something.

2. As an alternative can I make the filter the first level of selection and then have the teams/releases applied after a subset is created by the filter? Or are the selected teams and releases and the defined filter all applied separately?

All feedback is welcomed.

Thank you.

[Aaron Gage · Accepted solution]

@Verna LewisAs best as I've been able to find, the addition of filters, boards, projects to a roadmap is treated as an OR logic meaning you will get EVERYTHING in each of those additions.

EVERY issue that meets the filter and EVERY issue that shows on the board and EVERY issue in a selected project.  If you only want to get a very specific subset of Issues, I suggest using ONLY a very refined filter.

That said, if you want the tool to automatically populate sprint dates, you have to also include the respective board......IMO, this is a significant misstep in design by Atlassian, because by including a board(s) you then end up getting all the issues contained in the board.  It's quite frustrating, sorry I don't have any better news for you.

[Verna Lewis]

@Aaron Gage Thank you SO MUCH for this quick and detailed feedback. Your description is what I thought it was doing... And I agree it is very cumbersome to deal with.

I tried to create a new plan with just a filter last Friday, but I could not get that to work because the filter I created does not appear in the drop down list when creating a plan. I am thinking this has something to do with the filter permissions. But I had been looking at this issue for far too long on that day, so I stopped. I will look into the documentation about the filter permissions and try again today.

Again, I really appreciate your feedback.

[Aaron Gage]

@Verna LewisI have found that you almost always need to just start typing the name of your filter to find it in the list.  The list seems limited in cache and thus only give you the top ~20 in alphabetical order, but typing the filter name has always worked for me.

And not that it helps, but this was my original post of plea, lol: Original Question 

[Verna Lewis]

Thanks @Aaron Gage ! I had to change the filter security to make it available to all logged in users and then it came up so that I could select it when trying to create a new plan. SOOOO much easier that the teams/boards/releases selection process. I was able to create a "test" plan that duplicates my existing plan without all of the "issues without parent" entries. 

Filter will be my only selection criteria going forward. Thanks again!