JIRA Portfolio: How do you configure the issue link type is used for Initiative-Epic relationship?

Jason Wyckoff August 16, 2016

In JIRA Portfolio 2.0, you can have more levels of hierarchy than JIRA provides out of the box.  I believe the way the relationship is captured is using Issue Links.  Below is my current understanding:

 

 Child IssueParent IssueHow they relate
1Sub-taskIssuesub-task relationship
2Issue/StoryEpicEpic Link
3EpicInitiativeIssue Link?

 

My Questions:

  1. Is it true that the "custom" hierarchy levels utilize Issue Links?
  2. If so, which issue link type(s) are used?
  3. If that is configured, where is it configured?**

 

** NOTE: I'm not talking about the dependency issue link, which OOB is set up to use "blocks".  This, I believe, is a separate type of configuration / issue link.

 

 

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Rhys Christian
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 16, 2016

Hey Jason,

Good question. There isn't an equivalent field in JIRA between epic and initiative similar to Epic Link.

However we are currently working on implementing a query-able parent field in JIRA that will let you see the parent Initiative on the Epic issue view page.
Is this the kind of functionality you're looking for? If not, can you please explain your use case?

Cheers,
Rhys

Jason Wyckoff August 17, 2016

Rhys - 

One fundamental deficiency of JIRA is lack of true multi-level hierarchy structure.  It is pieced together with a couple independent patterns (subtask and epiclink), but that one gets your three levels. 

I thought that JIRA Portfolio was using Issue Links to denote parent/child relationship between Initiative and Epic.  I could be wrong, and looking for confirmation on that.  

"However we are currently working on implementing a query-able parent field in JIRA that will let you see the parent Initiative on the Epic issue view page.

Is this the kind of functionality you're looking for?"

Yes.  I want to be able to view the Initiative/Epic relationship outside of JIRA Portfolio.  

When you say "we", who are you referring to?  Where do you work?

Rhys Christian
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 17, 2016

Hey Jason,

Apologies, I should've clarified. I'm on the Portfolio for JIRA Product Management team.

I can confirm that in the short term we'll have functionality to view the parent/child relationship of custom hierarchy on the JIRA issue view outside of Portfolio.
I'll get back to you when this is implemented because it won't be out of the box with the update and will require some setup in the fields config.

Jason Wyckoff August 18, 2016

Thanks for the update.  So I'm clear, is the following correct?:

  1. The parent/child relationship of Epic/Initiative (or any other custom hierarchy) is not consumable outside of JIRA Portfolio (ie, in JIRA Core)
  2. This is, however, a feature that you intended to provide the future.  

Again, thanks for your response!

Rhys Christian
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 18, 2016

Both those points are correct.

Jabreal September 26, 2017

So, what's the status on this in the "short term"? Is this complete? Is it delivered? How can I get info from Epic to Initiative and vice-versa outside of Portfolio?

Adam October 7, 2018

Hi Jabreal, did you ever get  a response to this question, I am specifically interested in this for JIRA cloud please? 

I can't find anything that definitively states where this is at on the Portfolio roadmap for Jira.

Thanks 

Thomas Fraser November 29, 2018

If your structure is

Initiative

Epic

Task

 

Then Epics now have a 'Parent Link' field that links to the Initiative.

However the Initiative doesn't seem to have any way of linking to the Epic.

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Rhys Christian
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 29, 2016

Hey again Jason,

Just want to let you know that we have just released a new version of Portfolio for JIRA which allows you to view the parent/child relationship of custom hierarchy on the JIRA issue view.

If you are on a cloud instance then you should have the update but if you're on server you can download the update here: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.radiantminds.roadmaps-jira/versions

To set this up you're required to select the screens you want to add the parent link to. You can view documentation for this here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiraportfoliocloud/exposing-the-hierarchy-configuration-in-jira-software-844236828.html

Note that JQL search is not yet implemented and we're currently working on it.
If you have any feedback we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Cheers,
Rhys

Steven F Behnke
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August 30, 2016

Please consider maintaining an issue link as well so that 'issue in linkedIssues("EPIC-123")' queries and other hierarchy visualization tools work. Epic's, for instance, maintain a hidden issue-link of "Epic-Story Link" with "is Epic of" and "has Epic" levels. 

This allows users to use other Gantt add-ons, custom tools, and more to leverage the links between issues. I can expand on this in depth if you would like.

Rhys Christian
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 30, 2016

Hey Steven,

The reason for not using issue links was a decision of effort required vs. value gained. With this solution you'd still be able to query for the custom parent's children ('"Parent Link in (INITIATIVE-1, INITIATIVE-2, INITIATIVE-3)"). Beyond the add-ons/tools could you let us know why this query wouldn't work for you?

We currently don't have a good answer for dealing with other add-ons. Can you please let us know what specific add-ons require issue links so that we can investigate possible options?

Thanks

Nigel Budd September 27, 2016

Hi Rhys,

I have a couple of use-cases where having traditional issue linking would be useful.

Plug-ins such as links hierarchy would continue to work, currently they will not display hierarchy if parent link is set.

Extended jql functions such as issuefunction in linkedissueofrecursive(initiative) no longer work, we frequently call this to for example pull out work logs for all subordinate issues for an initiative.

I know both vendors could 'fix' to work with parent links, but at the moment I am having to set parent links AND issue links to achieve these things.

Parent link is easy to use, much simpler than linking I agree, it is still going to be weak until you provide the capability to query it...any idea when that might be?

Thanks

 

Nigel.

Jamie Echlin _ScriptRunner - The Adaptavist Group_
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
October 5, 2016

> ('"Parent Link in (INITIATIVE-1, INITIATIVE-2, INITIATIVE-3)"). Beyond the add-ons/tools could you let us know why this query wouldn't work for you?

That doesn't work for many people for the same reason that the out of the box queries for finding linked issues don't work, which is that often you can't provide a static list.

For instance you might want to say "Parent Link in ('unstarted initiatives for world domination')"

Why don't you do the same with epics-stories, ie use a system link but display it as though it was a field? That will allow the many plugins that traverse link relationships, eg ScriptRunner, Structure, various visualisation tools to continue to work.

Customers expect them to work with portfolio because to all intents and purposes, the parent appears to be a link relationship. 

cheers, jamie

Steven F Behnke
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October 6, 2016

I added a fairly extensive list of first-party and third-party festures that are incompatible with Portfolio's decision to reinvent the wheel, to the same discussion on LinkedIn. 

Plugins that allow queries on linked issues through jql functions, like scripteunner or jql tricks, the first-party linked issue query, scripts and addons I've created for clients, linking visualization plugins like Matrix or Links hierarchy, none of these addons will work with portfolios hierarchy until the portfolio team does the sensible thing and impliments linking the same way everyone else in the ecosystem does. 

Steven F Behnke
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October 6, 2016

It is widely known that jiras JQL is too flat, the inability to  search the linked issues means I'm selling JQL functions to my clients in the form of custom work or addons like the aforementioned addons. 

When previous solutions that me, other experts, and other vendors create and sell fall flat on their face, you better believe that we will have a problem in selling this to our customers.

for a single example (i could talk all day), some of my clients have scrum boards based on status of epics. Only stories associated with In Progress epics show up on a scrum board. 

i either need to generate an entirely new solution or simply drop portfolio hierarchy from being a functional part of this configuration. 

Dhigha Sekaran October 6, 2016

We have initiative/epic relationship setup in portfolio. Epic have a custom field called Initiative Link which points to the parent Initiative. When I query fields of the Epic using the Jira Rest API / Or export fields to excel. The initiative link points to an arbid name like below... even the parent link of an epic points to a value like this. How do I get the initiative the Epic is pointing to via the Web API or an excel export? Thanks in advance..

com.atlassian.jpo.env.issues.JiraIssueService$2@1626b7e
Maree Milne October 9, 2016

Update: Have created a suggestion for this as there didn't appear to be one: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPO-1663

We're struggling with the above too. We have ScriptRunner and Structure and use these to search on and build multi level hierarchies, of which the Initiative layer is one (and is the only one that won't play nicely). I wonder what criteria Atlassian used here for "effort required vs value gained" as you may have saved yourselves a minimal amount of effort, but have caused a lot of problems for your users.

Also given the long delay in getting the parent link field visible and searchable in JIRA, all our Portfolio users have been creating manual links using the standard functionality, then building filters based on these (using ScriptRunner's JQL functions) to get the children for collections of initiatives into Portfolio plans. We were hoping that once Parent Link was available we would be able to run a quick script via ScriptRunner to turn these manual links into "parent links", but have hit the above issue. This is going to result in a huge amount of admin for us to convert the links manually. 

Has anyone got a way around this? (i.e. some way to access the field value programmatically?)

Alexandra Winkler October 12, 2016

JPO-1579 (Make Parent Link searchable via JQL) shows resolved = Fixed as of 2.1.0 (7 Oct 16).  But the issue makes no mention as to how the issue is resolved.  Like Maree, we need this for our Portfolio Management activities.  Looking forward to having this capability.  Hopefully programatically, without having to enumerate every single initiative, as that would be impossible to maintain....  We need to be able to determine if any of our epics are orphaned (e.g. not connected to a parent initiative.)  

Andrew Ukasick April 24, 2018

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