How to quickly add a bunch of linked tickets?

[Benjamin Peikes]

We use "classic" style Software Projects in Jira, though we have started using the "Story" type item to describe features we want to add for our products.

One of the issues that we have is that once we know the "Story" ticket, there are often 3 -8 engineering tickets, associated with specific components of our product, that need to be created and assigned to people.

Service Desk projects have a "Create and Link" action, which copy some of the fields in the original ticket. It not available in software projects, and frankly its slow and kludgy.

How does everyone out there create multiple tickets in one shot using Jira? It's a bit crazy that there isn't an interface that's like a grid which would allow you to quickly add a bunch of tickets quickly.

For example, let say you create a "Story" ticket:
"Allow users to save and load table layouts"

You then might want to add 3 linked tickets:
1) Create table_layouts table in database
2) Add table_layouts resource in middleware
3) Save/Restore table layouts in UI

Right now, adding the other three tickets, each of which have a different component and assignee is painfully slow. In a tool like MS Project, it's simple to add a couple of tasks and their relationships takes a couple of seconds, in Jira it takes minutes and the UI for doing it is very clunky.

We don't like subtasks either, except for some very lightweight processes because a type has to either be a regular task or a sub task. We don't want a bug that has to be fixed or an improvement type ticket needing two different types, one for when it's a subtask, and one when it's not a subtask. i.e. Bug and Bug-Subtask.

How do you use Jira for creating multiple tickets?