JIRA Agile & hierarchical planning

Sami Lempinen October 9, 2013

We are using JIRA 6.0, locally hosted. We use hierarchical versions to represent major milestones (e.g. 2.0, 3.0) and minor milestones (e.g. 2.1, 2.2), and use both epics and user stories for planning.

While the hierarchical versions on the surface seem to be well suited for this purpose, in practice the feature does not seem to work as documented. Our problems are:

  • Using the agile Plan mode to drag a story to a minor milestone version only assigns that fix version, not the parent.
  • As a consequence, when we use version reports for burndown (or burn-up, rather) purposes, we fail. If we want to observe the version report both for the current minor milestone, all is well, but if we look at the major milestone, issues assigned to the child version are missing.

Our workaround is to manually enter BOTH the parent and the child version to the issues, which is becoming unbearable. The documentation says:

All issues under the child version are considered to be a subset of the parent version.

That does not seem to match the behaviour, at least as far as the version report goes.

What are we doing wrong?

1 answer

1 accepted

1 vote
Answer accepted
Kim Poulsen
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
October 9, 2013

Using the drag and drop feature in the Agile board Plan mode does not support adding several versions (or epics for that sake) to a single issue.

Usually you will see

ISSUE-30 My title <version x> <epic y>

If you _manually_ assign two or more versions you will see

ISSUE-30 My title <multiple versions> <epic y>

Dragging and dropping this issue to yet another version will wipe the current version assignment and replace it.

So not a solution rather a "I do not think it can be done" using drag and drop in Plan mode.

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer