Basic Concepts

Structure is the name of our product. In our documentation we differentiate between Structure, the app, and the structures that you build with it using capitalization. When you see “Structure” with a capital “S” we are referring to the app.  When you see “structure” with a lowercase “s” we are referring to the the structures you create in the app.

Think of a structure as a container that may be filled with Jira issues from a single, or multiple Jira projects. Within this container you may organize the issues into arbitrary groups of hierarchical lists. For example, you may wish to group your issues by type, by assignee, or by priority—or by some combination thereof. In fact, you may organize the issues in your structure any way you'd like.

Typically, Jira projects contain issues of many different types. For example, “bugs”, “tasks” or “activities”.

Structure adds a few new, helpful, project management elements such as folders, and generators.

Collectively, we refer to all of these (i.e., everything that appears in a structure) as items.

As mentioned above, Jira issues may appear in a structure automatically. This may happen when a template is used, or through powerful automation features that we refer to as generators. Every time you open your structure, the generators find and automatically add and/or manipulate the Jira issues in your structure using issue attributes and business rules that you specify.

We refer to a particular configuration of the columns that you decide to display in the Structure panel as a view.

When you place one item under another item in a structure it becomes a sub-item of the item above it. The item above the sub-item is the parent item.

Sub-items may contain sub-items of their own, and those sub-items may contain still more sub-items, and so on.  You may create as many levels of parent item / sub-item relationships as you wish in a structure.

Importantly, these parent item / sub-item relationships may be different in different structures. The relationships may be created arbitrarily to suite your needs within a particular structure.

Sometimes we refer to sub-items as children (of the parent item).

Jira sub-tasks and Structure sub-items are conceptually similar, but they are not the same. Jira sub-tasks are a special type of Jira issue that includes a parent/child relationship within Jira.

It may be desirable for sub-tasks to appear in your structures as sub-items of the relevant (parent) Jira task. However, this is not a requirement.

There are no restrictions on Structure parent/child relationships, so sub-tasks may be placed anywhere in a structure, like any other other Jira issue type.

With Structure, you may create any parent item / sub-item relationship you wish—and you may create as many levels of them as you wish. Think of a structure as a blank project management canvas that you may adapt to your project’s needs, or to team’s project management methodology—even if these things differ across different teams of different projects.