How to stop link to be propagated to subtasks in some projects ?

Question

Hello,
we recently upgraded to JIRA version 8.5, and found a difference in behaviour with the previous version (must have been 6.x ? I don't remember).

In our settings, for some projects, a main JIRA (say Bug or Feature) will end up with several subtask of different types (e.g. Development, Test, Documentation).

Some main JIRAs are linked (e.g. "related to") across projects because they belong to different products, and that's how we track inter-product compatibility/dependencies.

Now in the past linking JIRAs was only linking the main JIRAs. Now, for some projects, all the subtasks are suddenly inheriting the link, but not for all.
E.g.
I got my main JIRA AAA-1 and BBB-1 in two different projects (AAA and BBB)
AAA-1 has one subtask: AAA-2
BBB-1 has 3 subtasks: BBB-2, BBB-3 and BBB-4
If I link AAA-1 and BBB-1, with "is related to", the following links are created:
AAA-1 is related to BBB-1
AAA-1 is related to BBB-2
AAA-1 is related to BBB-3
AAA-1 is related to BBB-4

And that, whether I start the link from AAA-1 or BBB-1.
In one case the subtask is not linked (here AAA-2), but in the other they are (BBB-2, BBB-3, BBB-4).

I cannot find where this behaviour could be defined, in the project configuration, or in the administration page.

Can anyone help ?

Thanks and regards,

Thomas

Thomas Corriol · Accepted Answer

OK, we went to the bottom of it:

Labels and Links are propagated to the subtask if they pre-exist in the parent task and the subtask is created via the workflow of the parent task. Creating them by hand does not seem to have any effect.

The project BBB subtask is created via a simple "standard" post-function.
The project AAA subtask is created via a groovy script post-function, and "constructed" field by field (and the label / link fields are not constructed).

So the standard behaviour IS to cascade down labels and relationships to the subtasks, when the subtasks are created as part of the workflow, with a standard post-function. The reason it's not happening in project AAA is that the subtask is created from scratch by a special script that does not copy them.

So either we need to create the same sort of script for the project BBB workflows, or we need to create a script to clean up the subtask that has just been created.