Transitioning Stories and Sub Tasks

peter_fosvm8

Hi there -

We are currently using Epic / Story / Sub Task in Jira. Stories are tied to Features that the product team is creating in Aha. Once the stories get added into Jira, the development team estimates the work required and if necessary breaks down the Story into a set of Sub Tasks. 

Our stages are Backlog > Selected for Development > In Progress > In Code Review > In QA > Done

My question has to do with best practices around moving Stories and Sub Tasks through the Kanban board. Right now, we move all Stories into "Selected for Development" when we prioritize from the backlog. From there, Sub Tasks are being moved through the Kanban board but the Story stays in "Selected for Development" until all Sub Tasks are moved to "Done". This causes some problems because Features in Aha are synched with Stories, so status is not properly updated in Aha. 

It also seems a bit counter-intuitive to move Sub Tasks through the Kanban without also moving the Story in parallel. 

Would it make sense to switch this up so that Sub Tasks are only moved through the Kanban when the entire Story is ready to move? So, for example, the Story and all related Sub Tasks would get moved from "Selected for Development" into “In Progress” and would not be moved into "In Code Review" until all the Sub Tasks are ready for code review? Or would this complicate things and/or slow things down?

Appreciate your input as relates to Jira best practices. 

Thanks!

Petter Gonçalves

Hello Peter,

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

I believe the methodology to don't transition the sub-task issues until the whole Parent Story is ready to be transitioned is a good practice used by many other users in JIRA.

The only bad thing about it is that you will not be able to have the precision of where each team responsible for each sub-task is at, since you will not be able to transition a specific sub-task until all of them are finished.

If you don't need this kind of tracking in your sub-tasks or would accept it to be registered in a different way (by worklog entries in the sub-tasks, for example), this would be a good approach to properly track your work and reflect in Aha!.

Let me know if this information helps or if you have any other questions.