How to prevent subtasks

Sonata Adomaityte

Hello,

I have a question, how to do the whole automatization if this is needed:

I have a task, in which I create lets say 5 child issues.

But the trick is that I need lets say for child issue 4 not be able to go from to do to in progress or to done status if all other previous (1,2 and 3) child issues are not marked as done.

How do I do that?

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Sonata Adomaityte 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

An Automation Rule can't be used to prevent the transitioning of an issue to a new status. Automation Rules are trigged by an issue event (or manually, or on a schedule) so they are reacting to an event that has already completed, such as an issue transition being completed.

You could add a custom field to the subtasks that would indicate if the predecessor subtasks are in a state such that the subtask should be allowed to transition. You could set that field using an Automation Rule that evaluates the statuses of the predecessor subtasks. And then in the workflow Transition for the subtasks you could use a Condition/Validator/Rule to confirm that the custom field indicates the subtask can be transitioned.

How do you identify which subtask is #1, #2, #3, etc?

Do you place a number in the summary?

Do you use generic issue linking to create links between the subtasks so that #1 blocks #2 and #3 and #4 and etc., and #2 blocks #3 and #4 and etc., and so on?

The Automation Rule will need some method to determine which are the sub-tasks that precede and succeed a given task, to be able to check if they are all completed.