What does setting Status of a subtask to Backlog or Deferred actually do?

Question

We are looking for a way to defer or move subtasks from an Issue into the backlog or defer them to the next sprint when it becomes clear that those subtasks will be done next sprint instead of the current sprint. Ideally, we could "keep them" for a future sprint without having to rewrite them as part of another story, then modify the story points to accommodate the reduced objectives and complete the modified user story with the reduced points being recorded and allocated to the current sprint.

Setting the status of the subtask to Backlog or Deferred does appear to allow one to close the story, but does not appear to allocate the points earned for the remaining Done subtasks. This is not what we expected.

Have we set up our "workflow" incorrectly or something? Are there other ways to accomplish what we're after? Of course we can make a new issue in the backlog and copy the text from each deferred subtask into it, but it seems like there ought to be a better way.

Note that I do also understand that one is supposed to scope the issue such that it CAN be completed within the sprint. But sometimes things change for us and we want to reduce the scope of an issue by splitting it.

Fiona Macelli · Answer

Thanks for the advice Alex!  I'm referring to the reports (burndown, sprint report, etc) when I say this:  "but does not appear to allocate the points earned for the remaining Done subtasks" . The remaining story points (once other "not done" items are deferred), don't appear to be counted towards the velocity.

And no, there's no particular pattern to our deferral needs. Sometimes we delay a part of the work or change the definition of done to accommodate a stakeholder's timeline or some such event.

I'll keep a better eye on the story points when we close the next sprint and make sure that what I'm saying is actually the case, and then we'll give JIRA automation a try.

John Funk · Answer

Hi @Fiona Macelli  - Were you able to answer Alex's questions? Are you still having problems? Did you try out Automation For Jira?

Alex Laycy_dvwa4f · Answer

Hi @Fiona Macelli ,

Are there any patterns or commonalities with the sub-tasks that aren't getting completed, that you're looking to defer?

i.e. you're stories are develop functionality A, and the sub-tasks are dev, QA, UAT and it's the UAT that consistently isn't getting completed.

It sounds like everything is working as expected, could you expand on this though - "but does not appear to allocate the points earned for the remaining Done subtasks" - Are you referring to the sprint completion summary here?

Without knowing your answers to the above, you could utilise a plugin similar to JIRA Automation to either trigger an automatic set of events when a sprint is completed, manually, or on a schedule to copy any incompleted sub-tasks over to new issues to take the manual work out of it.

- Alex