Customer hierarchy in Jira

[Levi Clarke]

Im looking for some tips on best practices for configuring Jira. My organization runs a pretty typical SAFe situation with business goals being broken down into Epics, these Epics get broken down into quarter(ish) sized features, and then dev teams create user stories to implement these features which are executed on a sprint cadence. 

I have Jira premium with Advanced Roadmaps and I'm trying to configure a customer Issue type hierarchy but I want to be able to display 

1) Quarterly plans at the Epic level

2) Increment plans at the feature level

3) sprint plans at the dev team story level

Will Advanced roadmaps allow me to keep that hierarchy in place and provide visibility into the status and dependencies at all levels? I want to make sure I configure this correctly out of the gate. 

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Accepted solution]

Hi @Levi Clarke

the bottom 3 levels of the Advanced Roadmaps hierarchy are always Epic / Base issue types / sub-tasks. You can only add new hierarchy levels on top of that. What you can do though is to rename the epic type and level - but even then, the epic level will always have certain semantics, e.g. in the Backlog or Active Sprint view.

If you really want to mix additional levels into the bottom 3 levels - I wouldn't really recommend doing so - you can only do that via issue links. Jira itself won't recognise these issue links as parent/child relationships, but there are apps in the Atlassian Marketplace that can help with this. Happy to elaborate if this is something that might be of interest to you.

Best,

Hannes

[Levi Clarke]

Thanks Hannes, I think the best thing for me to do is embrace the terminology and go with the tool. 

Initiative -> Epic -> Story. 

It'll take a while to get used to it but I think its the best way. 

[Wilson Sheng]

@Levi Clarke , great question! Advanced Roadmaps is a solid choice for visualising your SAFe workflow. 

And if you are looking to get more flexibility in defining your issue hierarchy, like creating additional levels like "Initiative"/ "Feature" above Epic, you can consider using Hierarchy for Jira in conjunction with Advanced Roadmaps. 

Moreover, it will display issues at all levels on a single tree, so you can track them and visualise the dependencies easily. 

[Levi Clarke]

In trying to configure this on my own I can't seem to move the "Epic" issue type to the top of the hierarchy. I can't "uncheck" it from the #1 level. See screen shot below: