JQl to get jira issues that are and whose parents are linked to a Product Discovery Idea

[Julie Leonard]

Our product team wants the following work items on a Jira board in their own swimlane:

1. Work items (stories, bugs, epics) that are individually linked to Product Discovery idea 

2. AND any stories, tasks, bugs whose parent is linked to a Product Discovery idea

I can get #1 working with the following JQL: (Using the Advanced JQL Functions add-on)

project = "FMA" and issue in LinkedIssuesOfQuery("project=PM AND (status='Define' OR status='Discover' or status='Ready for Build')")

This gives me the list of work items that are directly linked to the JPD idea. 

I cannot for the live of me figure out how to get the children of the parents that are linked.

Any help or alternative ideas would be greatly appreciated. 

[John Funk]

Hi Julie,

I would say the easiest way to handle that is to create a custom Issue Link Type specifically for JPD projects. Then your query would just look for that link type. 

[Julie Leonard]

Thank you, @John Funk Good idea!

Wouldn't that interfere with the way JPD links to Jira work items? 

[John Funk]

hmm good question. It looks like JPD uses an Implements issue link type for JPD to Jira. Is that correct? Look at the issue in Jira if you linked to it from JPD and see what the link type is. If so, then you should be able to query using that link type. 

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Julie Leonard and @John Funk 

From the UX and JQL, the JPD link to "delivery tickets" uses the "implements" link type.  For example

MySoftwareProject-123 "implements" MyJPDIdea-456

Behind the scenes, that is named the "Polaris issue link" type.

Inverting that type for JQL, this would return the "delivery tickets" to the Idea:

issue IN linkedIssues(MyJPDIdea-456, "is implemented by")

And so this could be used, and yet...unfortunately, Jira does not prevent using the "implements" link type for anything else outside of JPD.  So please verify that in your searches.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Julie Leonard]

Thank you. I looked at the linkedIssues function, but for that you need to specify a key. 

What I would want to see is the children of a parent which is linked to the JPD idea. That is the challenge. 

I can get the workitems that are linked, no problem. It's adding the children of the epics that are linked to the resultset of JIRA issues. It's almost like I would need to "nest" these functions and I haven't been successful in making anything happen with that. 

I came across some articles that seem to indicate that using scriptrunner would give me some functions that "could" resolve that, but I am flat out of budget for more add-ons. 

I may have to do something kluge with automation and add a custom field for any jira issue that linked to JPD that I can propagate down to the children of linked Epics. 

[Bill Sheboy]

As these are links between the Idea and the Epics (and you then want the child issues of the Epics) that cannot be done with built-in features...and so the marketplace addon route often helps.

When one has a large amount of automation rule usage capacity, a custom field added to the child issues for the Idea's key could be used to help.  The risk is ensuring all of the possible paths are handled to update the child issues...or use a scheduled trigger rule which only updates them daily (for example).

Some of those cases include:

• child issue created with an Epic parent which is linked to an Idea
• child issue edited with a new Epic parent...
• child issue remove from Epic parent
• child issue changed to a different Epic parent
• child issue deleted
• Idea linkage for Epic parent changed
• Atlassian automation outage which prevents rule execution; the scheduled trigger rule helps to mitigate this
• etc.

[Julie Leonard]

Thank you, Bill. 

I went down the route of the automation hack. Thanks for list of potential pitfalls to consider.