Issue Hierarchy

[Tony B]

QQ Community:

When Creating a Hierarchy in Jira. Does Initiative Come First and Then Theme, Epic, Story or  does Theme come First then Initiative, Epic, Story?

I am getting Different Reponses  when Googling this. What is Best Practice?

Thanks

[Joseph Chung Yin · Accepted solution]

@Tony B -

Welcome to the community.  As per other's responses, it is completely up to you.  You don't even have to use Initiative or Theme, you can name them to whatever it works for your organization.

Best, Joseph Chung Yin

Jira/JSM Functional Lead, Global Infrastructure Applications Team

Viasat Inc.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Technically, it's really up to you how you choose to implement your hierarchy

So, historically, Jira Software has implemented only three layers - Epic -> Issue -> Sub-task, and you can have many differently named issue types, and sub-tasks.  That obviously translates into Epic -> Story -> Sub-task in the names you are using.

Advanced Roadmaps gives you more flexibility - layers up above Epic.  The default is 

Initiative -> Theme -> Epic -> Story -> sub-task

But that's not fixed in stone, and the names are totally renamable.   Even their own docs do it differently (Odyddey -> Initiative -> Epic -> Story -> Sub-task).   I've seen initiative and theme reversed in that scheme in places, but what I see most often is something like 

Saga -> Epic -> Feature -> Story -> Sub-task   (People rename Epic to feature and then use Epic for the layer above)

The Epic -> Feature thing there is the (default) nomenclature for the Scaled Agile Framework, so we see it more often than other schemes.

TLDR: do what works best for you!

[Robert Wen_Cprime_ · Accepted solution]

Hello, @Tony B ! Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I've seen Theme at the top, and then Initiative, Epic, etc. But honestly, there's no standard above Epic especially since Epics traditionally aren't time boxed the way stories are.

Hope this helps

[Tony B]

Thanks