Best practice for scheduling of subtasks

mike.gunter

Hi, I'm fairly new and mostly self-taught on the Jira software and I'm looking for any tips/tricks/best practice when wanting to break a story down in to smaller parts and schedule those parts across separate sprints. 

When I have a story that I know is larger than a single sprint I want to be able to schedule and report accurately. If I just schedule the story in to a sprint and move it as 'incomplete' at the end of the sprint because all of the subtasks are not completed, it looks like I have not developed what I said we would (the story), but if I can schedule the smaller parts and record those as 'Done' then it's a more accurate picture.  

I have found that I can create subtasks within a story, but these subtasks cannot be scheduled individually, nor assigned to different sprints, they have to be scheduled with the story.

I have thought of a few options like creating epics and using stories for the subtasks or leaving the story in the backlog and creating tasks instead of subtasks, manually linking these to the story, scheduling the tasks and manually marking the story as 'Done' when all tasks are completed. 

Any help on a best practice to cater for accurate scheduling & reporting would be appreciated

Thanks

Cristiano Mariano

Hi Mike! How are you doing?

You are right! You can only schedule to Sprints issues that are in the Story level.

I would definetly recommend you to work with Epics for these bigger Stories. But you do not have to create a Story for every little task you have to do. You could break these Epics into a few Stories that are one Sprint long each, and then break these Stories into smaller sub-tasks.

Hope this helps!

Cristiano