How to prevent sub-tasks to move to a different sprint?

Question

Hi guys,

I'm coming from AzureDevOps working with Jira and I'd like to know if there is a possibility we had there in Jira Cloud version.

Let's suppose we have this scenario:

Story A - As a Developer I want XYZ so XPTO - Assigned to Sprint 01

sub-Task 01: develop module X

sub-Task 02: develop module Y

sub-Task 03: test X & Y

Let's consider we were not able to finish testing in Sprint 01 and I move the story to sprint 02... in AzureDevOps, I could move the story and chose which tasks I would assign to Sprint 02... the ones that were closed were kept in Sprint 01 and their time tracking would be kept in Sprint 01.

In Jira, when moving a story, all sub-tasks are moved to sprint 02 too also and I kind of lose track of which tasks were accomplished in Sprint 01 (and time tracking comes together) - this makes the Capacity Chart being messy.

Is there a way to overcome that?

Thanks,

Ciro

Ciro_Theodoro · Answer

Right... that is exactly what we are doing... estimating points at the story level and adding hours in sub-tasks. The issue I see is that if we bring all sub-tasks, a Team Member X will seem overcapacity because closed sub-tasks will also count as per current sprint, but I understood your point of view also... Jira seems more Scrum driven tool than an Agile driven tool in this case :-/

Anyway, thank you very much for your inputs Nic... I really appreciate your time to answer my questions.

Ciro

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

As far as I know, there are no plans to allow it to do scrum-that-is-not-scrum with sub-tasks.

There was some talk about trying to implement various strategies for configuring sub-tasks, but they went nowhere as "it's a lot of work to implement something that most people won't understand or use or doesn't seem to be right for them".

So I think they're just going to stick with the recommendation "Estimate Scrum at story level, with Story points (or another number) and do hour/time-tracking on sub-tasks"

Ciro_Theodoro · Answer

Hi Nic,

Thanks for your answer. I understand and agree with you about points effort of parent story... I mean, if a story could not reach the Definition of Done, we carry it over and its points should be considered as part of next sprint... but when it comes to understand "time allocation" for team members, it is a bit weird to me. We might have sub-tasks related to UI/UX that were part of sprint 01 and they will not be part of sprint 02 because UI/UX falls in a cadence a bit out of Scrum framework.

I believe Jira could be a bit more flexible in that point. Do you know if there are any plans to make it more flexible?

Thanks,

Ciro