Find nested parent relationships for Advanced Roadmaps

Question

Problem

I am beginning to use JIRA Advanced Roadmaps and we have enough tickets across enough projects it is only feasible to use Search Filters as my issue selector for populating the Advanced Roadmap.

We use the following hierarchy:

Initiative

Epic

Story

Unfortunately, JQL does not appear to me to have a built in way to look for "nested children" Stories underneath a given Initiative since the Parent Link field only displays the next level above.

Put another way, I have no way to recursively find the children under all the Epics in a given initiative.

I found a similar issue discussed at:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Advanced-Roadmaps-discussions/Constraints-and-best-practices-for-Parent-Link-in-Advanced/td-p/1778272

Would be great to know if anyone has a workaround that is free vs paid extension.

Thanks!

Casey Gould · Answer

Not wanting to add any paid or third party plugins, this is one of many more complicated searches that I hack my way around using Jira Automations.

Similar example: making date comparisons

Jira Automations allows you to do more hierarchy-based searching, so you could capture an issue and its entire lineage. Ultimately, you then need to tag the issues in some way (I use labels most of the time, but could be another field) and your filter is then based on that attribute that you can search for in JQL.

Key Elements for the Automation:

* Trigger - Scheduling it to run once per day might be good enough, or you may want to trigger based on another change if you need it nearly immediately refreshed.
* Conditions - Scheduled automations have a JQL field to define the query, or you can add other conditions, but you want to initially define the automation to only one level.
* Branch - The purple "Branch rule / related issues" component is how you start going up or down the hierarchy.
* Then continue to add the conditions and then the label you plan to filter to.

I don't have time to test it now, but if you're having trouble defining the Initiatives and getting it to run on the Epic children, you may need to start with the Epics and then check if the parent (Initiative) meets whatever criteria you need. There are still some odd nuances with parentage around Epics vs. other issue types based on Parent Link vs Epic Link.