How to set up hierarchy with Epic → Story/Feature → Task → Sub-task in Jira Cloud?

[Thisira Jayasekara]

Body:
Hello Community,

I’m an admin working on setting up a company management project in Jira Software Cloud. We need to establish the following issue hierarchy for our workflow:

• Level 1: Epic

• Level 2: Story, Feature

• Level 3: Task

• Level 4: Sub-task

The challenge we are facing:
Currently, Jira does not allow us to create Tasks under Stories or Features. Tasks seem to exist at the same level as Stories instead of being children of them.

Our goal is to have Stories/Features contain Tasks, and then Tasks contain Sub-tasks.

Questions:

1. Is it possible to configure Jira Cloud natively to support this hierarchy?

2. Do we need Advanced Roadmaps (formerly Portfolio) or a marketplace app like Structure or BigPicture to achieve this?

3. What is the best practice for modeling this kind of hierarchy in Jira?

Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you 🙏

[Trudy Claspill · Accepted solution]

Hello @Thisira Jayasekara 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

To do what you want with native Jira Cloud functionality you would need to upgrade to the Premium subscription plan. You could then extend the issue type hierarchy upwards above Epics. You cannot insert a level directly between Epics (level 1) and "standard" issue types (level 0).

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/configure-the-issue-type-hierarchy/

The full hierarchy is visualized through Jira Plans.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/get-started-with-advanced-roadmaps/

In the native Agile boards (scrum and kanban) the extend hierarchy is not readily visible.

Alternately you use generic issue linking to artificially create a relationship between your "Story" and "Feature" issues and their "child" Tasks. Jira would not recognize that as a parent/child relationship in any of its native functionality related to parent/child relationships, though.

And there is also the option of using a third party app to manage an extended hierarchy.

[Lukas Maczejka - JXL]

Hello Thisira,

Welcome to the community.

As mentioned by Trudy, the Premium plan likely offers what you’re looking for.

For an improved visual experience, and if you’re open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you may want to have a look at the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your Jira data that allows viewing, inline-editing, copy-pasting, sorting, and filtering by all your work items' fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel, Google Sheets, Smartsheet, or Airtable. It also comes with a number of powerful features, including highly customisable issue hierarchies. These issue hierarchies can be based on Jira's built-in parent/child relationships (like task/sub-task, or epic/story), and based on issue links of configurable issue link types. It does not matter if the issues come from one or hundreds of projects. You are able to connect and visualise them in a tree structure.

This is how this looks in action:

In this example, I've created another issue type above epic level, created the relevant issues, and connected them via issue links. I've then modelled this hierarchy in a custom structure in JXL, and voila. This works for all Jira plans, including the Standard plan.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Lukas

[Rahul_RVS]

Hi @Thisira Jayasekara 

Welcome to the community !!

You will need Jira premium / Advanced Roadmaps to create multi level hierarchy which only be above Epics. To create a custom hierarchy you can use issue / work item links. However you would need a mktplace solution to view linked issues in a tree  / hierarchy view. I can suggest our app

Issue Hierarchy 

The app also allows you to view your project issue hierarchy created with issue links in a tree view. You can view %complete progress at each parent level. It rolls up the time tracking fields, story point or numeric fields at each parent level. The app can be added to a dashboard as well

Disclaimer : I am one of the app team member

[Joshua Brock]

@Thisira Jayasekara 

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Looks like you're getting some great options...it's an invaluable community here. 

I'll just offer one more possibility. I am a content writer for Agile Hive. As pointed out, yes, you'd either need to upgrade your Jira subscription or look to a partner app.

Agile Hive specializes in enabling customization to your Jira Cloud instance according to Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®), giving you the ability to customize your work items and by extension, quickly identify and manage dependencies.

https://agilehive.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CLOUD/pages/512164965/Work+Item+Hierarchy

If you have an opportunity, give it a look:
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1218976/agile-hive-safe-structure-art-pi-planning-roadmaps?tab=overview

Most certainly, any questions, please feel free to reach out.


Thanks and best of luck!


Joshua
Agile Hive
Content & Technical Writer