Issue Hierarchy

[Gaurav Sood]

I have upgraded to Jira Premium. I would like to create the following issue hierarchy:

=> Initiative => Epic => Story => Task => Subtask

I cannot nest a Task under Story. I cannot add that hierarchy in Issue Hierarchy page, nor change the value of the enumeration on the Issue types pages. The enum for Task is 0, Story is 0, and Sub-Task is -1. But when creating Projects, I cannot add the nesting above.

Please can you help me fix this.

[Darren Ching]

Hi Gaurav!

Like others have pointed, Jira's built-in hierarchy doesn't directly support nesting tasks under stories. There are, however, workarounds you can leverage:

1. Utilize Jira's Issue Linking feature:

• Maintain the default issue types (Initiative, Epic, Story, Task, Subtask).
• Configure a custom link type , for example "is a child of", and use this relation to link your User Stories and Tasks together.
• You'll need to establish clear linking practices in your team for this method to be effective. This can be an overhead, although Automations may help ease some of it.
• Consider also setting the Parent field (formerly Epic Link) for each Task to the same Epic as the User Story you want to link it to, as this will make issue searching and filtering easier.

The downside unfortunately is Jira does support displaying only issues of a specific relation in a nested tree view since they are technically on the same hierarchy level, e.g. User Stories and Tasks that "is blocked by" those stories.

2. If you are open to using third party add-ons, Hierarchy for Jira fills that visualisation gap. This is an app that my team and I are working on.

Hierarchy for Jira displays issues in a nested tree view, and supports showing both native parent-child issues as well as issues only of a specific link type, such as the one I mentioned above. This is how it might look like for you:

The hierarchy above is set in the same way you described: Initiative > Epic > User Story > Task > Subtask. You can pretty much build any kind of hierarchy you want, and the app can visualise them in a nested tree view by reading your issues and link types.

If it helps, there are also a bunch of other features you can make use of, such as rolling up story points at parent levels, grouping issues together, and saving & sharing views with others in your team.

Hope this helps!

[Amay Purohit_RVS]

Hi @Gaurav Sood 

Welcome to the coomunity !!

You can use Issue Links to create a custom Hierarchy which will not impact your current project structure. If you would be interested in an add-on for this need, you can try out our plugin.

Issue Hierarchy 

The app shows your issue hierarchy in a tree view. The app can help you easily Sum up values (time tracking/story point/custom numeric fields) to see overall progress for your Issues at each parent level. Also it provides excel like editing for all the values right on the report and see real time progress updates. 

Do give it a try.

(Disclaimer: I work on RVS, the vendor for this app)

[John Funk]

Hi Gaurav - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

You fix it by not doing it in this case. Your proposed design does not follow standard Agile principles. Jira is following those standards so it is not Jira that has a design flaw.

[Gyeorye Lee]

It is not supported in Jira.

[Gaurav Sood]

I think this is poor design of JIRA.

As a PM then you cannot create a Story that has a number of different pages (customer journey), that allows you to have a Tasks per page, and Sub-Tasks for each page module as you cannot plan that hierarchy.

Due to this, you also cannot split the backlog subtasks between sprints. The entire Story with Sub-Tasks or Task with Sub-Tasks needs to stay in one sprint. This means EPICs are made up of only Stories/Tasks that last a sprint. Epics then are acting as each Journey, rather than Module level.

Seems the naming does not suit the functionality.

[YY Brother]

From the practice, story/tasks are expected to be completed in a single sprint. Epics are usually completed across sprints or releases.

From Lean perspective, small batch of work will flow more smoothly. So we need to control or split story/task to reasonable size.

[YY Brother]

Hi @Gaurav Sood 

Welcome to our Community.

Yes, we cannot level down the hierarchy of Task from 0 to -1. In Jira product, the hierarchy of Story, Task, Bug are in the same level. Alternatively, I suggest you use sub-task under Story/Task. 

You may also try other Jira Apps like BigPcitures to implement what you want. However, I don't recommend this way.

Hope it helps,

Thanks,

YY哥