Group by Field

The Group by Field generator allows you to group issues by most standard Jira fields.

Placement matters. Generators only affect issues beneath them, so if you want to group the entire structure, place the generator at the very top. If you place it anywhere else, it will only group the items beneath it.

Adding a Group by Field generator

To add a Group by Field generator, open the Add menu and select Group.

This will display the Group generator options. Select Field.

Configuring the Generator

Each Group by Field generator can be customized to create exactly the hierarchy you need.

Runs As

When a generator runs, it runs as the structure owner. This is important because the generator will have access to the same projects, issues, etc. as the user listed here – if they don’t have permission to view an issue, it won’t be added to the structure.

Field

Select the field issues should be grouped by.

Moving items in the structure will update groups

If checked, you can update an issue's field simply by dragging it to a new group. For examples, if you have grouped by assignee, moving an issue to another assignee group will reassign the issue.

This option is available for the following fields: affects versions, assignee, components, epic status, fix versions, labels, priority, sprint, status, version picker (multiple versions), labels (custom field).

Consider other Groups

By default, Group generators ignore data added to your structure by other Group generators, because in most cases the added data doesn't group well.

Let's look at the scenario above, where we grouped our structure by both Sprint and Status. Here's a breakdown of how that works:

Structure starts with your top level issues (or adds them with an Insert generator).
Next, it applies the first Group generator in our list, the Group by Sprint. This creates a new level in your hierarchy.
Then Structure applies the Group by Status generator. At this point, the true "current" level is a list of sprints, which are not issues and don't have statuses to group them by. So Structure ignores these items, and creates the new group of statuses based on the original issues.

Group on level

Allows you to specify which level within the hierarchy the grouping should be applied to:

Levels are based on the placement of the generator, where "Level 1" is the level the generator is located on, "Level 2" is the level beneath that, and so on.

Place the generator on

Select where the generator should be placed within the structure hierarchy. This location will be considered "Level 1" when determining which level the grouping is applied to (see "Group on level" above).

You have three options:

Current level - The generator will be placed on the currently-selected level.
Level below - The generator will be placed on the level below the currently-selected item.
Top level - The generator will be placed at the top of the structure.

If a level is grayed out, it means it is not possible to place the generator on that level.

See Generator Scope to learn more.

"No Value" Groups

When items in the structure do not have values for the group, they will be placed in a special flex item at the buttom of the grouping level, such as "No epics" (when grouping by epics) or "Unassigned" (when grouping by assignee).

This can be very useful when trying to identify items that don't have a value for a particular field. For example, we can quickly see that Story 6 is not linked to an epic. To link it to an epic, we can simply drag it to the appropriate flex item.

Grouping Order

Generators are applied to the current level, in the order they appear in the structure.

In the example below, we used an Insert generator to add issues, and then added Group by Sprint and Group by Status generators. Two new levels were created, grouping our issues first by Sprints and then by Status:

To rearrange the hierarchy so that Status is at the top level, followed by Sprints, simply reorder the generators, so that Group by Status is above Group by Sprint.