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  • Basic Concepts

This documentation relates to an older version 1.4 of the Structure Plugin for JIRA. View the current documentation home.

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Structure plugin lets you organize issues into multiple hierarchical lists. To get started, you need to get acquainted with a few basic notions we're using throughout this manual and in the Structure plugin itself.

Structure Plugin

A really cool JIRA plugin that you are reading about.

a structure

A single hierarchical list of issues. By default, there's only one structure called "Global Structure", but you can create as many structures as needed.

a structure contains an issue

A structure is initially empty - it does not contain any issues. Issues can be added to a structure manually, or they can be imported or added automatically by a synchronizer. A single issue may be present in many structures at the same time, or not be present in any.

structure widget

The main tool for working with the structure - a grid with columns that shows the hierarchy and allows to work with it. That's what you saw on our live demo server. Structure widget is present at several places in JIRA.

a sub-issue is under a parent issue

When you place an issue under another issue in the hierarchy, you can say that it's a sub-issue and the other one is the parent issue. A sub-issue may contain sub-issues on its own (and so it's a sub-issue and parent issue at the same time). To make matters worse, an issue that's a sub-issue in one structure may not be a sub-issue in another structure.

children issues

Sometimes we call sub-issues "children issues", but "sub-issues" is the preferred term.

JIRA has sub-tasks

JIRA has a very limited hierarchy based on sub-tasks, and since Structure integrates nicely with the sub-tasks we need to refer to them as, well, "sub-tasks". So "sub-tasks" are JIRA issues of the specific issue types ("sub-task types"), while sub-issues are just any issues that happen to be placed under a parent issue in a structure.