Jira backlog hierarchy

Luke Jones — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 05:53:21 +0000

The List is dead. Long live the Fractal.

Small lists are great, large lists are not. Why? Because you - the reader - give a small list context and we simply cannot do the same for a 1500 item long list.

Miller's Law tells us humans hold around 7±2 items in working memory at once.

With this in mind I took a snapshot of Apache Spark's public Jira backlog and produced a fractal view of the latest 5000 issues with their statuses mapped to the defaults.

Diving into one section of the fractal view we can see at a glance the great progress the Spark team continues to make - good job Apache!

The beauty of this view is you could be looking at 500 issues or 5 billion - all contained in a simple 3x3 square. Conceptually there is no limit.

Finally, infinity with context.

We can create a Sierpiński carpet we call Teppe (/TEP-uh/), where you can see and navigate through your entire backlog and intuitively see what’s related to what and whether it's been done.

This is all available free on the Atlassian Marketplace. No data leaves Atlassian.

If you would like to see how Teppe for Jira can visualise your backlog please give it a try - it only takes a couple of minutes.

We would really appreciate any feedback to help us improve and inform what direction we take the tool next.

Please do not hesitate to ask any questions.

I will shortly be doing a technical write up of how it's made and how we're able to render and navigate around tens of thousands issues in <10ms.

Thanks for reading.

Email: info@teppe.io

Luke

DEV Community: Luke Jones

Jira backlog hierarchy