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Does Jira support the concept of multiple parent links or upstreams like JAMA does?

Premduth Vidyanandan
Contributor
May 14, 2020

We have been using both Jira and JAMA in our company and in JAMA we were using the concept of multiple "upstreams" This is very important as we can have the same story enabling multiple Epics. We were able to do this easily in JAMA as there were no limitations on how many upstreams or downstreams links we can have. Does that concept exist in Jira? I scoured through the community and did not find anything favorable. How have people been doing this?

4 comments

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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May 14, 2020

Plain Jira Core does not have a way to do this, but when you add Portfolio to it, then yes, you get all the initiative/theme/your-layer functions on top.  (And Align - that handles it even better)

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Tom Kakanowski
Contributor
May 14, 2020

Thanks for that, its an avenue I will investigate!

Premduth Vidyanandan
Contributor
May 18, 2020

Nic, yes I am using Portfolio as well. Although I still see a fixed limitation of one. For example I can use the parent link and there can only be 1 value there. In Jama, I am able to have more than 1 parent for a given child. Even if I use the Epic Link, there also it is 1.

 

I tried to use Initiatives with portfolio and that works fine for initiatives having multiple Epic.. I am still unable to have 1 Epic have 2 initiative.. Essentially the concept of how do I get more than 1 parent linkage?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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May 19, 2020

You wouldn't expect Epics to belong to many initiatives - look at splitting them up if you think you need this.  (Dependencies are a different story of course)

Premduth Vidyanandan
Contributor
May 19, 2020

Yes we are doing that right now, that is how we are working around it. Although it does cause a proliferations of Epics in the system. Also even more important is the ability to have multiple parents for the stories.. 

Our use case is that we have a team that works on embedded software, a team that works on hardware tools and a team that works on software developer tools. All 3 components have to meet at a union for a full solution to be possible. What is going on today is since we can only have 1 Epic link, the first one to link to the story wins. This makes it harder to track as some of the stories are cross linked from the teams. In a small company this is very simple to do, although in a big company like ours it needs a lot of co-ordination.

In Jama we solved this by having multiple parents to the same "stories" so this way each parent can track the state.. Does a concept as such exist in Jira/Portfolio?

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Matthew Day
Contributor
December 23, 2020

As an update, in Advance Roadmaps (Portfolio) Cloud, I agree that you seem to be able to have only 1 parent, but you can have many higher layer tiers. 
I recently asked my CTO what a specific SAFe 'Feature' (Jira Epic) would be considered as relating back to on his technology initiatives, and he rattled off several that the feature enabled.

 I've not seen JAMA, but I'm consolidating on Atlassian to alleviate the many disparate apps my company use internally. 

You may think about correlation using other mechanisms like components, labels, or custom fields. Splitting epics isn't the answer for me. 

I'm certainly in the same predicament. I want my team to be able to correlate their work back to  Company Objectives and Departmental Initiatives. 

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AsmitaD January 26, 2021

Do you have this feature in your roadmap? 

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Pratik Mitra
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February 24, 2022

I also have the use case for allowing multiple Parent Links. We have two product varients that need a number of components combined to deliver them.  However, one team are being good agilists and have sevaerl reusable solutions that can be used for "both" varients.  Other than creating a complete poinless duplication of parent child strucutre - we can't represent this.  We are using the Progress Fields for the top level items in Roadmaps and our "in transition" PMO group love this feature - if it were able to accurately represent the child/grandchildren items...   Any suggestions WARMLY welcomed.

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Jakob Mayer-Maly August 25, 2022

Hi,

at the moment our approach ist to use issue links to work with multiple "parents"

Works okay with structure Plug-In, but not just with advanced roadmaps

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Robin Weis
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August 9, 2023

I am currently analyzing the use of Jira in our company. For this I also wanted to use Advanced Roadmaps to show complex relationships between corellating software projects.
Since plans are meant to accurately identify conflicts, I'm wondering how Jira has made it this far without having this feature! I haven't really run into any other limits in Jira so far. But this has me stumped. We want to direct resources to critical processes, find the most profitable projects in the jungle of competing projects.... but without an n:n mapping, that becomes difficult. An issue definitely needs multiple parents as well.

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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August 9, 2023

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

If an issue could have multiple parents, you can't have a usable planning hierarchy.  Take the simple case - issue estimated at 8 hours, and has two parents.  Is the split of hours 4:4?  2:6?

And what about ownership?  If it's in two Epics, and the Epics belong to different teams, who owns the issue?

You simply can't plan if you do that.  Nor can you do stuff like Advanced Roadmaps.

If you want a hierarchy, you need a single parent.  To handle all the other stuff like dependencies and interests, you build your n:n matrix with relationships such as links.

Robin Weis
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August 10, 2023

I have currently implemented this with links. Because I also think that this becomes too complex.
What we actually want to achieve with this is to show which developments are part of main objectives and sub-objectives. And, how main goals behave, if e.g. subgoals shift etc. (We want to control and promote the directions of the software development via the main goals).
The problem with the links now is that only the "blocks/Is blocked by" links are actually shown in the plan. Here you would need more options. With the existing option to chain issues one after the other, I can't manage that.
The existing option "relates to / is relatet to" could also be used for a corresponding display in the plan. (A is part of B; B contains A). Then my usecase would be covered.
Since I'm still new to the Jira world, I'm of course also grateful for tips on how to do this differently.

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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August 10, 2023

I think links are the best way to do this in Jira.  There are apps for Jira that do dependency (and other mappings) via links.

And then as things shift, you move them to the right place, or add/change the links.  You're not limited to the list Jira offers by default, you can add your own link types.

Which plan are you looking at?  There may be a way to get it to look at other links.

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Johan Hörmark
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November 22, 2023

Hi,

I really really like the idea of Advanced Roadmaps being able to not only show parent/child but to be able to tell the plan what links to display in the Gantt chart view.

How can we upvote this proposal, we are a large user of Jira in our organization.

BR

Johan

Peter October 10, 2023

This request/question is being tracked here.  Please upvote and add your comments to show it's importance to your org: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-24819

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Stephen Chasey
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March 5, 2024

If Jira Plans (Planner/Advanced Roadmaps) could be configured to display linked issues in the hierarchy, that would be ideal. This is one of the reasons I still use Structure.

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