How to show Hierarchy Links graph for a whole Sprint in Scrum Board

[Kuno Baeriswyl]

Hello,

we use the Scrum Board in our team for handling our stories, subtasks and their status. However, we've missed a compact overview of the Scrum Board, specially, if many stories, subtasks and developers are involved. Furthermore, we are missing the dependencies between the Issues.

As a consequence, we were looking for an hierarchical representation of all Issues releated to the current Sprint. So, I've tried out the Links Hierarchy Plugin. It seems the plugin supports the Link Hierarchy of an ordinary Issue (Epic, Story, subtask) only, but not for a whole Sprint.

Is that correct? What is your suggestion in order to show such a graph? Are there any releared work in progress features?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Kuno

[Kuno Baeriswyl · Accepted solution]

Hello!

Thanks for your reply.

Actually, we are using Jira version 6.1.7. We did consider your proposed option 1 already. However, we really needed to visualize the overall progress of our sprints for our business people.

Option 2 seemes to be feasable but very delicated, since this special issue must always kept in sync.

Hope to see full support of Sprints one day and thanks again for your answers.

Kuno

[Pablo Beltran]

As you are using JIRA 6.1.7... is not the option1 valid for you??

The Issue Navigator and a Sprint report are just the same in terms on data. The only one difference would be in terms of layout:

While from a Sprint report you would see the full hierarchy at a glance, from the Issue Navigator you see just the same data with the following layout differences:

• The Sprint root is in the search box
• Its inmmediate children are displayed on a flat table at the left rather than on a tree hierarchy.
• The rest (all its grandchildren and so on) would be visible on synchronized tree hierarchy at the right. Well, You can see the hierarchy for a selected sprinted issue only at once rather than for all the sprinted issues. For few sprinted issues with small hierarchies, a Sprint report would be nice. However, for many sprinted issues with large hierarchies, the Issue Navigator is better. In fact, earlier versions of the Links Hierarchy add-on displayed such large full tree hierarchies. But they are not easy to read by humans. You have to collapse a lot of nodes in order to see something. While compacting results in a flat table + synchronized tree is much more handy.

I mean the benefits of a Sprint report (large hierarchies vs compat table+synch tree) are not so much clear against the current Issue Navigator view. See please the picture below showing the equivalence...

Hope this helps

[Pablo Beltran]

Well, a more strict representation of the Sprint report (a true tree hierarchy):

Nevertheless, nothing essential would change compared to the previus Sprint report representation.

[Pablo Beltran]

It seems the plugin supports the Link Hierarchy of an ordinary Issue (Epic, Story, subtask) only, but not for a whole Sprint.

Is that correct?

Yes.

What is your suggestion in order to show such a graph?

Option 1) [Recommended] Use the Issue Advanced Search View (it would require JIRA 6.x in this case)

It is not a pure graph, but this might help: since the JIRA 6 version, the Advanced Search view has been improved a lot and it shows the results on a flat table at the left sinchronized to the issue deatil view at the right.

You can run a simple JQL query like sprint = 1 and it would populate the flat table with all the issues belonging to the Sprint. Then you can explore the hierarchy for each issue very quickly by selecting an issue form the table and seeing its hierarchy at the right. As the Links Hierarchy displays an icon with the Futurue and the Active Sprint, you might inspect what linked issues does not belong to that sprint.

Option 2) create a new issue and link types.

Well, you might want to create a new issue type: "Sprint" and and a new link "owns/belongs to" and create true regular links for your sprinted issues.

Sprint 1 (owns) -> Issue X

Sprint 1 (owns) -> Issue Y

Viasualizing the Sprint 1 hierarchy would give you the graph you are asking for, but I would say it would bring many other problems like syncrhonization of your real JIRA Agile Sprints with the new Sprint Issue.

Are there any releared work in progress features?

Not at the moment. Supporting a new project report allowing users to select an Sprint and drawing the full hierachy just as you are requiring might help for sure, but it is not yet planned in the short term. Nowadays it is being enhance to support some sort of API at the server side to populate issue objects with custom data prior to send back them to the client and at the client side to support some javascript actions accordingly to to custom data feteched from the server. But it is still under earlier development.