My organisation is currently using Portfolio with a hierarchy that broadly follows the following pattern -
Initiative > Epic > Story
It's also used to track budget/time/cost allocations, so in other words we use the metrics around number of epics/stories/tasks and the time taken to measure the "cost per delivery".
This works fine when tracking development & analysis tasks - 1 task = 1 unit of measurable work, however we now need to incorporate testing tasks. We have another JIRA plugin, x-ray, which is doing the job we need in terms of test management, reporting, traceability and so on, but because it uses custom issue types and I can't create a parent link from my Initiative issue to my Test Plan issues. It only allows a link to an epic.
This is a problem. Whereas dev effort can be accurately tracked by one task, under one story, under an epic, if we record tests as tasks too then for any given release we would need to create hundreds or thousands of tasks - remember, this is because we need to record the time spent testing too. Not only that, JIRA-123 could be identical to JIRA-456 in terms of the test we are running but because we need to create two copies to track two executions, we lose the metrics/traceability that comes so easily with x-ray. Not to mention the ease of audit of test effort that regulators require.
I've been advised it's not possible to allow parent links to link to Test Plan or Test Execution issue types, and even if we could it would ruin performance. Is this the case? Is it possible to create a parent link that can use Test Plan or Test Execution issues and do you have evidence that allowing portfolio to have parent links to JIRA items other than epics would lead to performance problems?
