How do I ensure stories with sub tasks show the expansion arrow in the backlog?

[Siobhan Wood]

Using stories and sub tasks of stories, some show up in the backlog with an expansion arrow to easily show the sub-tasks under that story. But some stories don't have the arrow, even though they have multiple sub-tasks below them. 

They all seem to be set up in the same way, but I can't figure out why not all of them show the expansion arrow. 

We are using stories as our roadmap items, then sub-tasks to show the work needed to deliver that item. And it looks as if some stories aren't mature enough or developed enough to have sub tasks yet, but that isn't the case. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Does your board filter include all the sub-tasks (irrespective of status) when you run it as a search?

[Siobhan Wood]

Hi Nic, 

Yes I believe it does 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Hmm.  I'm a bit stuck then.

But one more quick check before the debugging essay.  Could you have a look at an issue that has some sub-tasks and should have the expansion?  Are all its sub-tasks "done" or "resolved" (or both)?  ("Done" means "has a status mapped into the last column of the board this backlog is part of", and "resolved" means "any value set in the resolution field" - Jira usually displays resolved issues with their key struck out)

If I were your admin, I would want to see four things:

• A screenshot of the board, including at least two stories, one with and one without the expand
• A screenshot of both issues in the main issue view, showing that they both have subtasks in the subtasks panel and what the status of those subtasks are
• The exact text of your board filter

If you could share those, that would probably be a great help in debugging this.

You may well have data in all three of those that you do not want to share, like project names, assignees, summaries, comments, descriptions etc.  We do not need to see most of it, but we must get the issue key so we can see what is connected where (and whether the subtask is resolved), and the data in the fields the search refers to needs to be consistent so we can match it all up, but feel free to obscure everything else, and replace identifiers.

For example, if you have a board filter of "Project = XYZ and issuetype in (bug, feature, subtasktypes()) and assignee in (Bob, Alice)", then we need to see

• The issue keys (but not the project name or the issue summaries, just the keys)
• The issue type
• The status of the issue
• The assignee field, but if you want to replace Alice and Bob's names with Nic and Morty, so that we don't know you've got Alice and Bob working with you, it's fine as long as we can rely on when you say Nic, it's Bob, and when you say Morty, it's Alice - just needs consistent identifiers
• Your board column mappings.  Although no screenshot needed if the left-most column, headed "unmapped" is empty, we just need to know that all status have been mapped or not.