How do I group issues in a work management board?

[Eline Antonissen]

Hi all, 

To capture, discuss and process feedback from users we use a JIRA work management board. The board defines different stages of the feedback and enabled the business to see what feedback was given before and if and how it is being worked on. 

Some feedback issues are related to the same 'theme/problem', but we only know that after the feedback ticket has been created. After creation, we want to have the option group these similar feedback tickets under a higher group to keep more overview in our board. 

I tried to add a 'theme' issue type but I can't find a way to add other issues while not showing those specific tickets on the board anymore... 

Anyone a good idea how to handle this? 

Best regards, 

Elin

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Eline Antonissen 

The Board for a Work Management project will show all active issue cards in the project, except for issues classified as "sub-tasks". You can use the Filter option to select the types of issues you want to display, and thereby exclude display of the Theme issue type. Example:

Do you need to keep track of the movement of the Theme through the statuses, like you do for Feedback? If not, you might want to consider using the Category field to apply a categorization to your Feedback issues instead of connecting them to a Theme issue.

What are the requirements around how you want to track and report on Themes? Can a Feedback item relate to more than one Theme?

[Eline Antonissen]

Thank you so the detailed answer! Good suggestion to use the category. However we are using category differently already. We use it to distinguish the feedback per feature to allow filtering by focus area. This helps to give overview in a different dimension! 

The reason I am looking for another solution is that sometimes we get 4-5 different feedback tickets about a feature which are connected to the same root cause. Seeing all of those 4-5 feedback tickets on the status board causes the board to be unnecessarily cluttered and therefore harder to interpret. The status and updates for all those 4-5 tickets is the same because they have the same root cause. That is why we are looking for a way to group those 4-5 tickets on the board and only show one status and update.

Hope this helps to better understand the request!

[Trudy Claspill]

The native issue hierarchy for Jira is

Epic
|-- standard issue types
    |-- subtask issue types

Jira recognizes a parent/child relationship between Epics and standard issue types, and between standard issue types and subtask issue types, and has some special functionality available related to those relationships. Generic issue linking can be used to create a link between related issue also, but that generic link is not recognized by Jira as a parent/child link.

Unfortunately, with a Work Management project both Epics and Standard issue types will be displayed on the board.

Besides the filtering suggestion I provided, another alternative to consider is to convert the Feedback issues that have the same root cause to Subtask type issues, and make them "children" of an issue that represents the root cause.

Subtasks do not show up as separate cards on the board. Instead they show up collapsed under their parent issue.

The parent issue shows the number of its subtasks that are "done" (0 in the example) vs. the total number of subtasks for that parent issue (1 in the example).

If you click on that "0/1" area the parent card expands to show its subtasks. BPC-6 is the subtask and BPC-2 is the parent.

Parent and subtask issues can have different statuses, but the group will show all together in the column that matches the parent's status. In the example above, the parent issue BPC-2 has a status of In Progress, so the parent and all its subtasks are in the In Progress column even though the subtask has a status of To Do.

Jira does not automatically keep the status of parent and subtask issues in synch. You would have to create an Automation Rule to handle that.

Two things to note about subtasks:

- Subtasks can have only one parent issue.

- Subtasks are a different type of issue from the "standard" issue types which can impact reports.

Are you working with a Team Managed project or a Company Managed project? That information will display at the bottom of the project list panel on the left. If you are working with a Company Managed project you can have different types of Subtasks, like you can have different types of "standard" issues, so you could have a Feedback-Subtask and other types of subtasks, if you needed to distinguish subtask types. In Team Managed projects you can't have different types of subtasks.

[Eline Antonissen]

Thank you, this is really helpful! I will start trying out this solution :)

[Trudy Claspill]

Let us know how that works for you.

To convert the Feedback items one at a time from standard issues to subtasks use the Convert option you can find in the ... menu when viewing an individual Feedback issue.

You can also use the Bulk Change option from the Advanced Issue Search screen. Filter for all the Feedback issues that you would want to make subtasks under a single issue. In the Bulk Change wizard select Move Issues as the action. Then reset the issue type to subtask and specify the single issue you want to become the parent issue for the converted issues.

[Eline Antonissen]

Thanks! For some reason I am not able to adjust the issue type. Any idea what could be causing this? 

---

[Trudy Claspill]

You will have to first add a Sub-task issue type to the Issue Type Scheme.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/add-edit-and-delete-an-issue-type-scheme/