Automation to add Parent Child Link for Child Issues of an Epic

[Christopher.Brandel]

I am looking for an automation solution that finds an Epic in my project that has child issues (from Parent Link) and then creates a Parent-Child Link for each of the child issues.

Better yet, If I can have it use the results of an existing filter/s to know which Epics to look at and make the change.

In some cases, the Epic may already have Parent Child links that may or may not be the same as the Child Issues.

[Christopher.Brandel · Accepted solution]

@Trudy Claspill And @Bill Sheboy  - Reason I am inquiring is because we use the Parent Field to link issues to Epics which in turn helps to populate the Timeline/List view hierarchy tree in Jira Advanced Roadmaps (JAR).  There are instances where the teams only used this field to indicate a Parent/Child relationship. 

The team likes to use the dependencies view in JAR to see different dependency types (Blocked, Implements, Parent/Child of, Depends On).  Because some Issues only have the "Child Issues" (via parent field) and not the "Parent Child Link Type" (via link type) they are unable to visualize the Parent Child relationships.

I know that I can show the Dependencies field in the Timeline/List View, which then essentially shows the desired information, however, it is helpful for the team to visually see those connections in the dependency view.  

To do the above, I need to update "old" tickets and also catch any new tickets being created that don't have both types of info and "correct" them.

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for that information, and I am unclear how this could work with automation rules...

• Issues such as Story, Task, and Bug can "link" to zero-or-one parent Epic.  This leads to a one-directional path of linkage.
• Using issue-linking, there is a many-to-many, bi-directional relationship.  (Until recently, I believe the same issue could even be linked multiple times to the same issue, using different types!)  There is also the possibility of creating a linkage cycle: issue A > issue B > issue C > issue A

Putting these concepts together, I could understand how a person could view the issues to decide if there is a specific parent Epic and link that, or they could view the issue Summary and Description to decide any issue-linking relationships (i.e., A blocks B), but a rule may not be able to parse the information consistently.  Further, the rule may need to be recursive, and possibly cause automation service limit challenges.

Automation rules for this scenario might be possible if the team members were very, very disciplined, only used specific issue-linking types, and removed all other link types in the Jira site to prevent errors.  But that still depends on the people not making mistakes.

[Christopher.Brandel]

Hi Bill, thanks.  Yes, I have run into the situation where we had recursive linking and it caused a lot of issues with traceability. I understand better now that having the one to many linking possibility, then I can see how it would be difficult to write automation to check for that.   I may try to use a Smartsheet->Jira connector and then write some formulas to check for matches in Parent field and links, then maybe just highlight the ones that need adjusting and manually add them.  I feel like this may be easier to add links this way rather than one by one in Jira.  

Thanks for your help.  Much appreciated.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Christopher.Brandel 

Would you please clarify what problem you are trying to solve?  That is, "why do this?"  Knowing that may help the community to offer better suggestions / alternatives.

In the meantime...

With Jira Cloud, issues such as a Story, Task, or Bug link to a parent Epic using the "parent" field.  They do not use issue links to do so.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Christopher.Brandel 

Let me see if I understand your requirement.

You have Epics that have issues appearing in the Child Issues section:

You want to add an issue link between these Epics and their Child issues so that the child issues also appear in the Issue Links section?

If I have not understood your requirement correctly, can you provide screen images to illustrate what you want to achieve with your Automation?

[Christopher.Brandel]

Hi Trudy, Yes, that is exactly what I am looking to do. 

[Trudy Claspill]

That prompts me to ask the same question as @Bill Sheboy  - Why do you want to do this? What problem are you trying to solve?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Christopher.Brandel 

If you use a Dependency (issue link) as a secondary way to show the parent/child relationship between Epics and their child issues then the relationship will show not only in the hierarchy of the Timeline (1), but also as Dependency links in the Timeline (2). Is this a desirable outcome?

Is the Parent/Child issue link ever used to connect other issues besides an Epic and its child issues? If so, it seems like this could become confusing in the Dependencies view.

In the below example TCSC-12, 13, and 23 are the Child issues of the Epic, but because of other users of the parent/child link 12 is also a parent to 13. And TCSC-46 is a child of an entirely different Epic, but also linked to 23 with the parent/child link.

Add to this all the other dependencies links you might use and it seems like this visual could become very cluttered and confusing.

Is there really value added by adding "dependency" links between Epics and their children?