Automate Linking in Custom Hierarchy

[Mark Schweighardt]

Hello, We are trying to use Jira + Structure for Jira pugin to achieve the following hierarchy and to automate the linking of the levels in the hierarchy:

Initiative

     Epic

          Story

               Task

                    Sub-Task

Can someone please explain how this can be done?

thanks

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Mark Schweighardt 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

I have not worked with Structure before, but I think a useful piece of information to provide would be if you tell us whether your environment is Jira Cloud or Jira Data Center.

Also could you provide more information about how you think that the automation should work?

The default hierarchy in Jira (both Cloud and Data Center) has 3 levels:

Level 1 = Epic
|-- Level 0 = "standard" issue types like Story, Bug, and Task
    |-- Level -1 = Sub-task issue types

When viewing an issue of a type higher than Level -1 there is usually a method directly within the issue to create a child issue. Executing that function will automatically create the parent/child relationship between the issue being viewed and the issue being created.

The native hierarchy would not support creating a Task as a child of a Story because natively they are in the same level. That, of course, is where apps like Structure add capabilities to Jira that it doesn't have natively. And such apps may require you to provide some configuration information about the issue hierarchy you want them to recognize.

Since I don't work with Structure I don't know the details of how to configure it, or if you then have to perhaps create the issues through the Structure UI in order for the parent/child relationships to be created automatically.

Have you reviewed the documentation that is provided for Structure to see if it contains the answers you are seeking?

Is there some other functional path that you think you should be able to use to automatically create links in the manner you show in your hierarchy? Are you trying to set up an Automation for Jira rule to do that for you?

[Kelly Arrey]

Hi @Mark Schweighardt,

As far as I can see (on cloud), we don't have the option to move Tasks one level below Stories in the Jira native Work Type Hierarchy. Our approach, which we developed before there was a Parent field, is to use issue links to extend the built-in hierarchy. We've defined a custom issue link type we call "contains <-> belongs to", i.e., the Story contains the Task, the Task belongs to the Story. We use Structure Power Mode, and use an Extend Linked Item Extender generator to pull in tickets linked by a "contains" link. This plus a Child Work Items Extend Generator to pull in the Stories under the Epics and the Sub-tasks under the Tasks would build out the structure.

Can you tell us more about what you had in mind in terms of automation? You can manually create links from tasks to their "parent" stories. 

Here are links to some relevant Structure Cloud docs:

• Getting Started
• Extend Generators

* Disclaimer - I have no affiliation with Structure, I'm just a happy customer.