Cannot workout the issue hierarchy

[Andrew Newton]

I am trying to work out the hierarchy of Jira. I'm a newcomer to Jira but not to issue management tools in general. The concept of a project is clear and under projects we have releases which are also clear. Beyond this it gets messy however. I've watched hours of Youtube videos on Jira and read all the documentation but all I see are people using random methods to get to issues instead of an organised approach.

If I have issues in a release I cannot rank them to determine the work order (there's a priority section but that's very weak). Therefore to work around this, under "release" I'd have a "sprint". However several sprints don't seem to form a release. Instead, sprints are generated in a board, from the backlog and exist separately.

If I want to go an look at my sprints I have to (ironically) go into my backlog which only exists if I create a board. This begs the question "what is a board". Jira documentation has this to say: "A Jira project houses the collection of all issues that need to be completed to achieve a particular goal. A Jira board, on the other hand, is the tool used to manage those issues as they move from creation to completion". But isn't this a sprint?! If it isn't, what is a sprint? Why are sprints so loosely attached to releases?

Then there are Epics. Whilst Epics are useful, they again break the hierarchy. They can go outside of sprints or inside them. An Epic is also given an issue number so whilst it encompasses several issues, it is also an issue itself and this doesn't appear hierarchically, only as an icon in the issue list. Child issues to an Epic do not seem to inherit the properties of the parent.

Lots of videos and documentation will talk about these features but few go into the issues I am experiencing. I'd appreciate any tidbits about the Jira workflow that I'm missing because I'm stabbing in the dark at getting sprints and releases organised here. Getting the urge to go back to post-it notes!

[John Funk]

Hi Andrew - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Jira is designed to follow standard Agile practices, whether they be Scrum or Kanban. But also the tool is customizable to meet the needs of those implementing the tool. 

If you are trying to learn Agile practices by learning the tool, that's kind of a backwards way to do it. I would suggest delving into more training in those practices first. 

Now, if you have a standard practice that you following and are just trying to figure out how Jira could implement that, well that's a different animal. For that, we would need to know exactly what that process looks like in order to be able to help. 

You can do Releases associated with Scrum or Kanban. And Releases might span a single Sprint or multiple Sprints. But that's a methodology and how you are working more than a tool issue. 

[Andrew Newton]

Hello and thank you, 

I've been working in agile and scrum for years and years. I see that everything seems to be there to do both. I violate the traditional rules of agile (in honesty, this is the tail wagging the dog - software requirements are usually management driven, the flexibility in the order of completion is the only thing that the engineers have control over) but equally, in scrum mode which would better suit my explanation of sprints in the initial post, these are loosely tied to any release.

What I am really looking for is to create that top level hierarchy where a release has multiple sprints. The manager arranges the sprints and then the engineers deal with the issues however they want. At the moment, only boards seem to have sprints unless I'm missing something.

[John Funk]

Fair enough - that happens a lot. Let me research a little more and see if I can get you some better resources. 

But basically, you can adjust the hierarchy since you have a Premium subscription by going to Settings > Issues > Issue Type Hierarchy. 

There you can add levels above the Epic level if needed though I am not sure that's your issue. It just sounds like you are more Release driven. I have heard of some folks doing that through the Advanced Roadmap - now called Plans. You might start by looking there. Google something like Jira Plans and Releases. 

[Andrew Newton]

Since we last spoke it looks like there is a "navigate" feature that has been added which is essentially a shortcut to the ranked list of items in a release.I still haven't worked the ranking system out yet (it just looks like random letters and numbers) but this does at least allow you to navigate in from a release folder.

I'm not sure I find Epics that useful but I'm working in embedded space and our development is perhaps a little more granular than on a monolithic Windows application project.

Thanks for your earlier comments.

[John Funk]

Thanks for that update. No, you won't be able to figure the ranking - you will drive yourself crazy trying to do that. It is somehow/somewhat related to when the card first appears on a board - I don't know if that includes the backlog or not, but just the board proper. So if card A is created a year ago, and card B yesterday, and both are in the Backlog ...  If card A gets move to the first column of the board first, and then card B, then card A will always move to a higher ranking in a column with card B when the two are pulled into the same column. Of course, you can drag the cards up or down to reorder. And not sure if that order holds as you go to subsequent columns or not.

And all of this is theory on my part based on past observations, though I have done no actual experimenting/testing of the theory.