Epics not linking to Stories and Tasks not linking to Stories in Advanced Roadmap

[Ayo Ayoola]

We have set up Jira hierarchy to capture a theme in an Epic, and specific Projects/topics in a User Story which is then broken down to Specific Tasks and we use Sub tasks to capture the different phases/steps in a project.

Whenever I try to pull things into a plan in Advanced roadmap my User stories are not linked to the Epic and my tasks are not linked to the User Story. I have ensured that all the issue types pulled are linked (Parent-Child relationship) but all the Stories, Tasks and sub tasks are coming up as issues without parent. Can someone please help me.

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Ayo Ayoola 

Can you provide some screen images of an issue an Epic with a Story, and a Story with a Subtask?

To achieve the parent/child relationship the issues have to be "linked" in a specific way. For instance a story has a unique field for specifying its parent Epic - the relationship is not created with the generic issue linking functionality.

[Ayo Ayoola]

Hi Trudy,

Here is a screen shot of User story Epic NET-1045 which is a Parent of User Story NET-1044 parent to Task NET-2341. Thanks

[Trudy Claspill]

In JIRA natively there are three basic levels of issues:

• Epics
• Stories/Tasks/Bugs
• Sub-tasks

JIRA recognizes parent/child relationships as follows: Epics can be parents to Stories/Tasks/Bugs, and Stories/Tasks/Bugs can be parents to Sub-tasks. Stories/Tasks/Bugs cannot be parents to each other. This is not done through the generic issue links, but rather through specific functionality. Stories/Tasks/Bugs have a field called Epic Link that identifies their parent Epic. That is what is missing here; your Story and Task issues do not have their Epic Link field set to net-1045. When the Epic Link field is set in the Story/Task/Bug, then when you are looking at the Epic details you will see a section labeled "Issues in this epic".

[Ayo Ayoola]

Thanks, this works I am now able to link Epic-->Tasks--> Subtasks. The only problem I have now is that I can't link Initiative to Epics. I will create a separate question for that as I can consider this done.