How to rapidly switch an issue to a subtask?

Question

I am fairly new to SCRUM concept, and here is how I understood it could/should work:

I am currently having my dev team create their issues into Jira directly, whether it's a bug, story, task, etc. Enssentially, whenever they find something, they can create an issue about it in Jira backlog.

However, very often, the issue they create will actually be a sub-task of another story or task. And I cannot ask them to create the issue as a sub-task because they don't know if it's a subtask or not (and it makes no sense to ask them to find out through the whole backlog).

In my mind, I thought I could just link child issues based on the current backlog issues I had, but from what I understand, you can only link sub-task issues as a child.

Then, if I click on an issue, and hover above its type, it will allow me to change it only to another issue (not a subtask), so I actually have to go through "Move" action to move the issue as a subtask.

Can anyone please shed some lights for me here, or any better best practice you would recommend? (For context, we're a startup of 20 employees, but with a team of 6 devs only in total, I'm the product owner).

Thanks!

Lenin Raj · Accepted Answer

Hi @Kevin Sauvageau

> I actually have to go through "Move" action to move the issue as a subtask.

What you have already mentioned is the quickest way to convert an issue into a subtask.

Kevin Bui · Accepted Answer

Hi @Kevin Sauvageau - As far as I know, the method you've suggested is the only way to change a Story/Bug/Task to a subtask.

But if you don't want to go through that hassle, depending on the nature of the tasks you might find it more appropriate to link the two issues, to indicate a relationship between them. For instance, you can mark it so that one issue relates to another.

Not sure if it's appropriate for the tasks that you're tracking, but it's an alternative you can consider.

To learn more about issue links, check out the Atlassian documentation.