Craft.io workspaces are made out of four levels: Product, which is the top-level and is mainly used as a container level, and three additional levels that are used to hold the working items: the Epic level, the Feature level, and the Sub-Feature level. In this release, we’ve focused on enhancing the visualization and utilization of this hierarchy structure. First, to better visualize the hierarchy, we’ve updated the icons of the main items. Product, Epic, Feature & Sub-Feature levels now have new icons that reflect their position within the hierarchy tree.

Second, as the most effective way to look at views is on a specific level (Epics, Features, or Sub-Features), we’ve added a controller to the various views called Hierarchy. The Hierarchy Controller allows you to easily choose which item level to show on the view, while maintaining the ability to display views with items from different levels, using the Flexible toggle.

Another usability enhancement we’ve made is the ability to sort by Hierarchy. This new capability allows you to list the items in a view according to their natural order within the hierarchy - it will place Epic on top (as it’s listed in the Spec Editor), then all of the features of that Epic, then the second Epic and its features, etc. If you’ve defined that Sub-Features should also be displayed, they’ll be listed right after their parent Feature. This is useful when you want to see Epics and their child items, all together in one view.

We’ve improved the mechanism that adds items to the various views. First, we’ve made the addition of new items smarter and more contextually-aware - the system now automatically identifies the parent that’s related to a new item; if the system can’t detect the parent on its own, it will ask you to verify that your items are connected to the correct hierarchy.

Second, we’ve added the option to add an existing item to a view or group. For example, if you’re currently building your Kanban roadmap, you can now easily add an existing item from your backlog to a column release by searching for it and then adding it.

Sometimes, you need to add an item to a view that already has existing filters. The newly added item may not apply to any of the existing filters, and so it will disappear from the view after the next refresh. This flow may lead to confusion (“where did my item go?”). In order to notify the user beforehand, we now mark the item that will disappear from the view with a dashed border that signifies that the item is only temporarily in this view, and will disappear next time the view refreshes.

We hope you enjoy Craft.io’s latest features! Jump into Craft.io and try them out for yourself.