Creating a custom Hierarchy

[Simon Wakeford]

We're trying to create a couple of custom hierarchies to better manage EPICs and Tasks.

It could be a visual Hierarchy - as in we specify the grouping for the display - or an actual Hierarchy enforced in the workflow. I suspect that a visual Hierarchy is the more llikely.

Essentially we'd like to be able to support these two concurrently:-

• 1) EPIC -> Tasks -> Sub-Tasks (eminently doable as standard)
  
  
• 2) EPIC -> User-Story -> Tasks -> Sub-Tasks (don't know how to achieve this)

The problem is that User-Story & Tasks are at the same level (both a child of an EPIC), so when you are in an EPIC view, both User-Story & Tasks are lumped together under the EPIC and you cannot see how what User Story/Task links exist without going into the item, which is a royal pain.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

In Jira Premium, you have access to Advanced Roadmaps, in which you can set up a hierarchy above Epic, and set up other levels.

You can't do two conflicting schemes at the same time, that makes no sense, whatever the software, and it is not helpful for humans to see hierarchies that skip layers (although you can partly do it in Jira - Epics can have sub-tasks without needing an issue in-between them because the Epic is a type of issue, despite being in the layer above issues)

So, in Advanced Roadmaps, I would set up

• Epic
  • User Story
    • Task
      • Sub-task

But not as a simple add.  I would rename Epic as "user story" first, then add a new issue type for Epic and promote it above the "new" user story.  I think I would add other issue types at the task and sub-task levels, and possibly others at user-story level and maybe Epic too.

Or, you could set up 

• Epic
  • User Story
  • Task
    • Sub-task

if you wanted to keep user-story and task as issue types at the same level

[Simon Wakeford]

Thanks so much for this. Extremely helpful.