How can I pre-populate the start and end date of a subtask?

Andrea Unwin

I want to be able to enter the start date for Story A, have that start date become the start date for Subtask A within Story A. Then the end date for Subtask A will automatically be set as one month after the state date for Subtask A. Then the end date for Subtask A will automatically become the start date for subtask B. Then the start date for Subtask B will set the end date for Subtask B one month later. Essentially I want to be able to set one start date  for Story A and see a predicted timeline for the rest of the subtsks in Story A. 

 

Then, if I change any of the start or end dates within the chain of subtasks in that Story A, the following subtasks should still automatically shift based on that date change. 

 

How can I do this?

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Andrea Unwin 

You can do that through Automation Rules. Are you familiar with Automation Rules?

https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/jira-cloud-automation/

The first thing that you have to figure out is how will Jira be able to look at the subtasks and determine their order. Will you using generic issue linking to link them together so that the first subtask blocks the second subtask which blocks the third subtask, and so on? Jira Automation will have to be able to programmatically determine which subtask is the first one in order to update it and then figure out which subtask is the second one and so on.

I wrote a community article on how to update the start date of a dependent task based on the end date of its predecessor being updated. You can find that article here:

Updating dependent task's dates when predecessor task date changes 

This does not cover the scenario of needing to automatically initialize the dates on the first subtask, nor using that to iterate through the other subtasks and initialize their dates. The initialization process would need to be a separate automation rule.

For the initialization scenario, which you are triggering by setting a date on the parent issue, you will need to have a method for Jira Automation to programmatically determine:

- which of the child subtasks is the "first" subtask"

- what the duration of each subtask should be (if it is not a fixed value that applies to all subtasks)

My article also does not cover the scenario where the start date is being manually changed, and you want to automatically update the end date of the same subtask. My article specifically covers just the scenario where the preceding subtask's end date has changed, causing a change to the successor subtask's start and end dates that also maintain the original duration of the successor subtask.

I would suggest a separate rule to handle the scenario where a start date is changed, with the rule modifying just the end date of the same task. For that rule you would need to make sure that the option on the Rule Details page to allow the rule to be triggered by other rules was NOT enabled. When this rule finishes and updates the end date of its own subtask, that would trigger the rule I wrote about in my article.