Epic in Plan is not showing stories from different projects

[Marcel Plomp]

We have a general project with Epics which all or some teams have to work on. By selecting a custom field value the Epic shows up on the Agile board for the related team(s). Then the team can associate the issues from their own development project with the (general) Epic.

In plans however I only see the Epic and not all issues associated with it as these are in different projects.

What general filter can I use to select the "Epic Project" and the issues linked to the Epics in that project so they show up in the Plan.

[Mark Segall]

Hi @Marcel Plomp (inactive) 

I would look at the plan input source(s) and make sure it is inclusive of all desired projects.  If you have a board that is inclusive of all projects, you can use that or you can create a new filter like this:

project IN (project1,project2,project3) ORDER BY rank ASC

[Marcel Plomp]

Hi @Mark Segall 

If I do that, all issues from all projects will show up in the plan and that is not what we need.

We only want to see the Epics in the General project and the associated linked issues from any other project in the instance.

I know you can use this JQL :

• "Epic Link" in ( key-001,key-002,key-003,.......) or project = KEY

But the "maintenance effort" for this filter (and plan) will be very high as on a daily/weekly bases new Epics will be created (as demands that need to be fulfilled by one or several teams)

So basically the filter should be replaced by something like...:

• "Epic link" in ( project = key) or project = key

.....but that does not exist. 

To be honest I'm struggling a bit with an "organizational problem" here.
Based on the standard functionality in JIRA where you can share Epics across teams on an Agile board for those teams, this is apparently not supported by Plans.

The management however wants to see the complete overview for all Demands (Epics) and the effort/timeline/resources as provided by plans on story level.

[Mark Segall]

Thanks for the clarity.  This is indeed a limitation, but as you're on Jira Server, you could go the route of a marketplace app like Scriptrunner which would allow you to execute a query like this:

issueFunction in portfolioChildrenOf("project = GeneralProject")

The best I can offer natively, is taking your query one level higher to your issueType above the Epic.  There's still some overhead, but most environments don't have as much change above the Epic:

issue in childIssuesOf(IssueKeyAboveEpic1) OR issue in childIssuesOf(IssueKeyAboveEpic2)

[Marcel Plomp]

Well...... it seems that for every problem/challenge we have the solution is to buy another app.....as where I think that some functionality should be available out of the box.

The power of an Epic is that you can collect issues from different projects and keep them together. If you have Data Center (like we have), Plans is automatically available

But in the end combining basic functionality and Plans is not possible as for that you need an additional app.

It totally does not make any sense......but that is my opinion.

Thanks for your help anyway.

[Mark Segall]

Completely understand your vantage point.  I agree that as great as Jira is, it certainly has its limitations.  I know Atlassian is constantly working on them. Just last week I had the opportunity to participate in the Atlassian research group focused on improving dashboards.  In that session, I raised that many of my challenges with dashboards are actually limitations in underlying JQL and cited Advanced Roadmaps as an example.  So, they're listening to us.  It's just a matter of working through an always sizable backlog to make headway.

This doesn't help your current situation, but hoped the additional context would help.