What is Jira hierarchy, and why it matters
People find comfort in structure and organization. This is most apparent in the professional sphere, where ranking tasks according to importance guides interactions and workflows.
Atlassian’s Jira Cloud tool helps project managers organize tasks to ensure teams deliver outcomes that meet stakeholder’s requirements, schedules, and budgets. These features divide the development process into tasks called issues. Issues are organized into a framework that captures, prioritizes, and tracks each action item throughout the project lifecycle.
This framework is called the Jira hierarchy. Learn more about it and discover how it can streamline your team’s workflow.
Understanding Jira issue types
Before diving into the Jira hierarchy configuration, you must understand the fundamentals of .
In Jira, any to-do item – fixing a broken link, creating wireframes, signing a contract – is considered an issue. To facilitate information gathering and tracking, the application classifies issues into one of four default categories:
User story: Leveraged in agile sprint development, stories define work from the user’s point of view. Some teams subdivide stories into tasks.
Bug: A fault that the team must rectify before delivering the project.
Task: A catch-all term defining a unit of work completed by a single team member or group. Jira users sometimes refer to them as parent tasks.
Sub-task: Sometimes called children, sub-tasks divide complex work into smaller, more manageable units.
With the , users can also create custom issue types to meet unique use cases or projects. Differentiated issue types allow teams to generate data, monitor progress, and establish customized dashboards and workflows for each task.
Understanding the Jira hierarchy structure
Jira’s hierarchical structure establishes several relationships between issue types.
1. Epics
In addition to the standard issues, Jira includes another type called an epic. Epics represent a project or larger initiative that encompasses all default issue types plus parent and child tasks. An epic is complete once the team finishes its collected tasks.
2. Features
Features bridge the gap between Jira epics and user stories. This level structures stories into a single body of work that produces a function, component, or technical specification.
3. Parent and child
Jira simplifies hierarchical organization by defining task dependencies using a parent/child relationship. This structure streamlines project management efforts and facilitates tracking individual project components. The Jira hierarchy includes epics, features, stories, and dependent and interrelated tasks. Essentially, epics are the highest level of the parental structure, followed by features, then bug, task, and story issues.
EPICS | ||
↳ | FEATURES | |
| ↳ | BUGS |
| ↳ | TASKS |
| ↳ | STORIES |
Organizing the hierarchy into a tree-like structure increases visibility into the development lifecycle.
4. Sub-tasks
Sub-tasks are children of default issue types – bugs, tasks, and stories. They facilitate task management and tracking by dividing more complex work units and adding granularity.
Practical examples of Jira issue types
A project team requires a shared vision to guide the development of deliverables, but that’s just the beginning. They must convert that vision into a manageable process using components and milestones. By building structure around those items, the team can organize their work into logical steps and use them to track progress.
Each hierarchical level captures vital information about product specs, templated into fields that provide context or guidance to those responsible for completion. Examples of fields include the following:
Title and description: Provide Jira users with clarity and insight into the task, highlighting requirements and defining the deliverable’s purpose.
Start and end dates: Establishes the timeline for delivery.
Priority level: Helps users order their work to achieve critical milestones.
Size, story points, and effort estimates: This data allows the team to quantify the task’s scope and complexity, facilitating resource allocation and fostering accountability.
Here’s how each level of the hierarchy works:
1. Epic
Epics are generally at the highest level of the project roadmap. They deliver big-picture, strategic outcomes that align with the project vision. Epics represent major functionalities, capabilities, or goals that span multiple releases.
Example: Stakeholders ask a mobile app development team to “enhance the user experience.” That goal becomes the project’s epic in the Jira hierarchy.
2. Feature
Features outline the steps required to achieve the project goals outlined in the epic. These are generally smaller but still significant vision elements. Project teams collaborate with stakeholders to identify and prioritize feature development.
Example: After consulting with users, the project team identified in-app messaging and improved search as the two highest-priority features.
3. User story
The project team subdivides features into individual stories, capturing specific requirements from the end-user perspective. Each user story, accompanied by acceptance criteria, represents a functional element the project team can independently develop, test, and release.
Example: For the in-app messaging feature, user stories include arrival and read receipts. This functionality tells the user whether a text arrived and was opened.
4. Task
Tasks emerge from user stories, precisely defining the work the assignee needs to perform. Tasks may also include quality assurance (QA) testing and analytics.
Project managers often ask team members to estimate effort before they begin. If the task needs input from multiple people, the PM may divide it into sub-tasks, creating another hierarchy level.
Example: The mobile app team designs a function that pings the sender when their message arrives in the recipient’s inbox and returns a message with the time they read it.
5. Bug
Bug tracking is a part of the QA testing process. It involves uncovering and logging defects the team must address before the sprint release. The product owner uses Jira to review the bug list and prioritize which bugs the team will work on first as part of the release management plan.
Example: If an in-app message crosses time zones, the read receipt records the recipient’s time instead of converting it to the sender’s. The dev team must address this bug before launch.
Limitations of native Jira issue hierarchy
Jira’s issue hierarchy doesn’t suit every project or organizational structure. The project manager can add hierarchical levels to the tree to suit their team’s needs. These levels may break down high-level product specs into additional initiative or issue types across multiple epics. They may also add new hierarchical levels to stories (rather than subdividing tasks) so agile teams can include them in sprints.
Adding custom hierarchy levels in Jira
There are two ways to extend the Jira hierarchy. Jira Cloud Premium and Enterprise offer a built-in customization feature.
According to Jira hierarchy best practices, this is the best way to add new levels:
Go to the bottom of the list of levels and click “+ Create level.” This will add a new level at the top of the issue type hierarchy.
Name the new level and click on the dropdown menu in the “Jira issue types” column to associate it with one or more issues.
Click “Save Changes.”
Jira Cloud or Data Center users may also download an app from the Atlassian Marketplace. Search “issue hierarchy” and select the right option for your team.
Using Advanced Roadmaps to elevate issue types beyond epics
Jira Cloud Premium users have an additional option to extend hierarchies. They can use the Advanced Roadmaps feature to configure issue types above the epic level, pushing project roadmaps upward.
Create a “New Issue type” and configure it to sit above epics in the hierarchy.
Link “Epics” to the new parent issue using the “Parent link” field.
Once linked, you’ll see child epics inside the parent category, similar to child stories displayed in epics.
Enhancing Jira Hierarchy with Tempo
Tempo’s tools help teams solve hierarchy management challenges within Jira. Our modular are . They offer enterprises a comprehensive view of all ongoing and planned initiatives to help them coordinate efforts and resources across multiple teams.
connects work from multiple epics and groups so project managers can while monitoring progress and identifying potential bottlenecks in real time.
Finally, is a trusted time-tracking and capacity management tool. Once , the software provides a detailed view of time spent on projects, epics, and tasks, helping identify areas for improvement.
