I need to be able to create 4 levels of hierarchies. JIRA software only has two: EPICS and story

[Bharati Susarla]

Jira Cloud only has two levels of requirements hierarchies...EPICS and Stories. I need 4 levels for a Portfolio view.....Theme-->EPIC--'>Feature---> Stories. Theme/Epic/Featuures should have rhe ability to create child issues and I should be able to view these mappings in a Roadmap view, along with Risks and Dependencies. Can anyone please help? Thankyou. 

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Bharati Susarla and welcome to the Community!

To be accurate, Jira Software has a 3-level hierarchy:

Epic

-> Story (includes Task, Bug and any other "standard issue types" you may define)

-> -> Sub-Task

But indeed, out of the box you will be limited in a free or standard plan.

If you upgrade to a premium plan, you get advanced roadmaps, which allows you to define an extended hierarchy above the Epic level. It should also be possible then to alter the name of your Epic issue type to reflect that change in your Jira instance. See See this community article to learn more.

If you don't plan to upgrade to premium, a common alternative would be to look at marketplace apps like Structure, that support implementing flexible issue hierarchy.

Hope this helps! 

[Bharati Susarla]

Thankyou for your very prompt response Walter. I will follow-up on the options yo uhave suggested and report back:-) Thanks again.

[Valdis Strautins]

How can make 3 levels under epic? 

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Valdis Strautins

the hierarchy levels up to epic - sub-tasks, base tasks, and epics - are somewhat fixed in Jira, and can't be changed in Jira's built-in hierarchy configuration. That's because they certain semantics associated with them, e.g. in how issues are shown in the Jira Software backlog, etc. 

One thing you could consider is to use issue links, which give you full flexibility on how you connect two issues to each other. The downside is that Jira doesn't really "recognise" issue links as parent/child relationships, and therefore doesn't consider them in its hierarchy-related features. There are, however, various hierarchy-focused apps on the Atlassian Marketplace that can do so.

As an example, this is how how this could look using the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira:

(I'm using an Epic/Story/Task/Sub-task hierarchy here, but it would work for any other hierarchy, too.)

For context, JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a number of advanced features, including support for (configurable) issue hierarchies. These issue hierarchies can be based on Jira's built-in parent/child relationships (like task/sub-task, or epic/story), and/or based on issue links of configurable issue link types.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

[Valdis Strautins]

Thanks, I did set up like parent links, but cant get to display them right in JXL

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Valdis Strautins

thank you for reaching out!

May I ask you to get in touch via https://support.jxl.app so that we can look into this in more detail?

Many thanks,

Best,

Hannes

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Accepted solution]

Hi @Bharati Susarla

just to expand on Walter's answer, there's actually a number of Marketplace apps that would allow deeper and more complex issue hierarchies. Good starting points might be to search for hierarchy- or structure-related apps for Jira. You probably also want to check for Cloud Fortified certifications, and customer reviews.

You may already know that you can trial any app for free for 1 month, and depending on the size of your site, an app may be free forever. So perhaps try out a few and see which one would solve your use case best.

Best,

- Hannes

[Bharati Susarla]

Thankyou for such a prompt response  Hannes, this is very helpful. I will check out all the options suggested.

[Danilo Medeiros]

I tried to use some apps to build a more complex issue hierarchies but, for while what is helping me is to link a User Story to another User Stories, Tasks or other issue types I created. So this gives the team the view of dependency between the issues and a sense of level 4 hierarchy