How to establish hierarchy between Epics and User stories

[Khurshid Akbar]

Hi Folks, I need to link Epics to User Stories so that when all attached User Stories are completed the Epic is marked as finished.

Similarly User stories could have relationship/dependencies with other User stories, Parent & Child relationship; Predecessor & successor relationship. Is there something similar in Greenhopper/Jira

Thanks

[Khurshid Akbar · Accepted solution]

In the Epic there is a field for entering the Epic/Theme enter the keyword that you want to describe the Epic with and then in the User Story there is place to select one of the Epic/Theme that you have defined

[Dimitar Dimitrov]

To use the the EPIC field as designed, you should use ussie ID and not just an arbitrary word as your comment seems to imply. This makes the epic screen of GreenHopper to show the EPIC as an ad-hoc aggregation of its comprising issues, summarizing time worked, time remaining, story points, etc.

In Green Hopper 6.2+ the Epics have been completely overhauled, so you'd better check the GH docs.

[Igor Sereda [ALM Works]]

Just in case this is still an open question, Structure Plugin does a good part of this job:

1. "GreenHopper Synchronizer" creates and maintains hierarchical structure of Epics and Stories - it can update Epic/Theme field for you if you create new stories or move stories from one epic to another with drag and drop.
2. "Status Rollup Synchronizer" looks out for sub-issues (Stories) that are resolved and makes parent issue (Epic) resolved automatically. There's a lot of configuration flexibility involved due to customizable workflows.

Hope this helps.
Igor

Disclosure: I work for the company behind Structure plugin.

[Deleted user]

It appears that the latest version of Greenhopper (6.0+) uses a different field and field-type for linking epics to issues on Rapid Boards. It appears that the Structure Greenhopper Synchronizer does not support this new format. Do you plan to support this soon?

[Igor Sereda [ALM Works]]

I believe the new Epics were introduced in GreenHopper 6.0.6 as a labs feature but perhaps will soon be mainstream. Structure's synchronizer does not yet support it, true. We plan to take a close look and see what we can do.

It might turn out that Structure won't be able to integrate with the new epics without corresponding API in GreenHopper. I've posted this feature request for GreenHopper team - https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/GHS-6542 - you can vote it up! Here's the feature request for this in our JIRA: https://jira.almworks.com/browse/HJ-1028 - feel free to vote/watch/comment.

Thanks,
Igor

[Igor Sereda [ALM Works]]

for the record, Structure 2.1 works with the new Epics, introduced in GreenHopper 6.1

[Dimitar Dimitrov]

Hi Folks, I need to link Epics to User Stories so that when all attached User Stories are completed the Epic is marked as finished.

Currently JIRA does not provide such a functionality - Epics are just labels and usage convention that is somewhat automated by GreenHopper.

Similarly User stories could have relationship/dependencies with other User stories, Parent & Child relationship; Predecessor & successor relationship. Is there something similar in Greenhopper/Jira

You can link issues and visualize the graph using the Link Hierarchy plugin. There is no functionality to have JIRA automatically resolve an issue when it's linked siblings are resolved (it doesn't seem very useful in the common case either).

[Kinto Soft]

The Links Hierachy Structure plug-in (internally) transforms Greenhopper Epic labels into issue links, so you can view those parent/child relationships on a hierchical tree structure.

Regards,

Pablo