Best practice to manage issues and child issues

Question

Hi everyone,

I'm new to Jira. I want to ask about managing issues and child issues. What is the best practice for:

1. For example, I have a feature that requires Android, iOS, and Web development (assuming no back-end work).

Should I create an issue for each (approach 1), such as

* Issue 1: [Android] Feature A
* Issue 2: [iOS] Feature A
* Issue 3: [Web] Feature A

or, create one issue with multiple child issues (approach 2), such as

* Issue 1: Feature A* Child issue 1: Android work
* Child issue 2: iOS work
* Child issue 3: Web work

or, any other approaches maybe?

If approach #2 is better,

2. The child issue assignees are clear enough, i.e. to each developer, but to whom Issue 1 should be assigned?

3. should I fill story points to child issues only and leave the issue's story point as blank?

4. how to manage QA tasks for each child issue? should I create one for each? so that in total there are 6 child issues.

5. how to manage releases for each environment? should I tag the fix versions only to the child issues and leave the story's fix version blank?

Thank you.

Gracjan Wesołowski _HeroCoders_ · Answer

Hi @Matheus Budi

Welcome to the community!

You might consider using the Checklist app. It's a great gateway from standard sub-tasks.

Checklist is a powerful, but lightweight way to manage small tasks, track your acceptance criteria, and ensure completed stories meet the definition of done. From my perspective, your example might suit well for the checklist.

They have many useful functionalities, for example, our app, Issue Checklist Free allows you to add deadlines, and assign/mention users for each Checklist item.

The configuration is quite easy, and if you have any questions we are happy to help.

Best Regards,

Gracjan

Alex Koxaras -Relational- · Answer

Hi @Matheus Budi and welcome to the community,

You should think about issue type hierarchy first and after that about grouping each issue type based on the "platform" or other type of grouping. For the latter you will use the build-in Components functionality, which do exactly what you want. So basically you can have the standard setup, which is:

* Epic* Standard issue types* Subtask issue types

with the above setup, an Epic is a huge amount of work that needs to be done and can be spawned across sprints. A task is can be a development task, a new feature, a bug, an incident etc. A subtask is a smaller piece of work, which in my opinion should not exceed 8h of work (one day). This will be very useful for devs to know what they can achieve during one day's work.

After doing that create your components. Components in your case should be iOS, Android and Web. These components have an the functionality of auto assigning an issue to their component lead. You can use this to group the issues further, as well as to identify which issues belongs to which component. Read more here: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/organize-work-with-components/