How to create deeper hierarchy between projects and tasks

[Chris Haley]

Hi

We're evaluating greenhopper for our agile project management needs, but have hit a problem. Hopefully you can tell us how we can achieve what we need.

In our process we create epics, which we order by priority. Each epic is broken down into stories, but some of these may in turn be broken down again, and again and so on. Theoretically there is no limit, but from a practical point of view nesting 5 story levels below epics should be adequate. The bottom (leaf) level stories can be ordered in the backlog, but retain their parent tree up to the epic level for traceability purposes. Stories are then broken into tasks as usual.

In case it's relevant, we use multiple teams, all working off the same project backlog, but with independent coterminous iterations. I understand that can be achieved in greenhopper by creating a project for each team.

The problem we have found is how to create the nested stories. As far as I can see greenhopper/jira only allow one nesting level epic->story.

Can you please advise how we could solve this, as without this feature, I am struggling to see how greenhopper will fit our process.

Many thanks

Chris

[Chris Haley · Accepted solution]

This is not supported, see

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/GHS-5356

[Kinto Soft]

Stories are JIRA issues, therefore you can built those nested levelsby using standard JIRA links.

[Chris Haley]

Thanks - unfortunately this doesn't work. The parent story is not shown in the backlog as parent of the child stories, and all remain as sibling stories under the epic, so completion of the child stories doesn't complete the parent. I'm sure these can all be handled by additional manual steps, but that's not really the kind of solution I'm after. Hopefully there is a way of setting it up to work how I need though.

[Kinto Soft]

so completion of the child stories doesn't complete the parent. I'm sure these can all be handled by additional manual steps

It can be automated by developing a custom plug-in and handling workflow events. You can capture when a issue changes its status, check its links (parent issues) and implement your own rules.

all remain as sibling stories under the epic

Visualization and automatic status management are two different things. Currently, no any hierarchy visualization is provided by the GreenHopper plug-in. You can view those hierarchical structures by using this plugin (developed by me):

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/1211022

it displays those hierarchical structures on issue pages rather than agile boards.

[Alexey Paveliev]

Automation of transition is relatively simple task in Groovy Script Runner. I was able to achieve similar results for cross project links with custom event listener.

Finding a parent issue for an issue (based on link name and direction) and all its siblings is not difficult.