RELATED IDEAS
Add another level between features and initiatives
I was thrilled when the new Strategy Roadmap feature was added to Aha....until I realized that it won't work for us. From the release notes:
"Use the new Strategy -> Roadmap view for doing top-down, longer range planning and highlight your major roadmap themes."
This sums up what for me was the biggest missing piece in Aha. However, we have Initiatives mapped to Epics in JIRA and Features mapped to Stories. Our developers rely on the Epics groupings to keep their work organized, so not having a field in Aha that can map to Epics is a problem. But using the initiative field for Epics means that the strategy roadmap is really meaningless since it will show pieces of projects and not true initiatives.
Maybe there is a better way to set up Aha to get the best of both worlds? Would love some feedback on this.
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ADMIN RESPONSEMay 24, 2017
Today, we have introduced Master features -- a powerful new capability for your bigger work items. You can use Master features as another level in between your existing strategic initiatives and features, where you can group multiple features that span across many sprints or releases.
Read more about it in out blog post: https://blog.aha.io/epic-roadmap/
Please note -- Master features are not immediately supported by our integrations, but we are working hard to add that functionality in the near future. So keep that in mind — they are not supported by our integrations right now.
Not having feature hierarchies (epics) makes the roadmap feature useless. I look forward to this being released.
This would make my life so much easier - whilst still enabling us to work integrated with JIRA as we need to. . If we could add initiatives as another tier between the existing initiatives and Goals layers and for the new layer to act as the initiatives layer is currently designed to against the strategic road maps then I am quite prepared to use bribery if it will help. So if someone at AHA could give me an address I'm more than happy to send flowers or cakes or wine or any combination of these - whichever you prefer.
Great to see the status of this changed to Planned, this functionality couldn't come soon enough. I had to create an entire product line just to properly map product initiatives and keep them separate from our epics that span releases.
We have a similar challenge; there are a lot of capabilities in Aha that let us get close to Epics, but it remains a stopgap. Feature relationships help by allowing us to indicate a feature belongs to another, but it isn't really treated hierarchically. We usually align teams around Epics, so we're using initiatives as a stand-in, but then the release plans/roadmaps are limited since we can't represent initiatives in a release roadmap, only features.
So close, yet still too far! Would love Epics, or some kind of feature hierarchy.
I would say that the Epic is the Feature and the Story is the Requirement and then you have Tasks under the Requirement. I believe Aha has their terminology off for JIRA integration. Add the extra layer but rebrand Requirements as Tasks that JIRA sub-tasks mapped to and the Requirements map to JIRA stories and are under the Features which map to JIRA Epics and Features are children of Initiatives that have no JIRA mapping as Epic is the highest hierarchy in JIRA Agile (which is a major JIRA Agile limitation).
Totally agree! We had to shift our hierarchy up to use the Product Line Initiatives as our Initiatives. Then we used the Product Initiatives as Epics. This actually works pretty well for us, and you might consider it as a workaround for now.
It would be nice, if this would allow user to pick level of linking easily. For e.g., linking Feautre from Aha to a higher level item (higher than Epic) from Jira.
Glad to see the decision changed, this will really help with organizing strategy vs tactics within Aha!
Thrilled to see the status on this change to "Likely to Implement". Can't happen soon enough for us.