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Moving subtasks along with their parent tasks up one level

Clara Fernández_czhmd8

I have a software team-managed project where we work mainly with task-level issue types that have children subtasks associated.

We have now decided that we want to work with epics as our main issue type rather than tasks. But when I bulk-move my tasks to make them epics, the children subtasks lose their associations with them and are left as "orphans".

This is a problem as we have many tasks to move and we want to keep their dependant subtasks attached to them (whether these remain as subtasks or are converted to tasks we don't really care).

Is there any way to make these changes in bulk? I.e. for child subtasks to be automaticallly moved to remain attached to their parent issue?

Accepted answers

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Clara Fernández

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Parent and child issues must come from directly adjacent levels. As such, Epics can't have subtasks.

There is no built in single button solution for what you want to do. Brainstorming a solution...

Create a custom Text Field for and add it to the Subtasks.
Create an Automation Rule that selects the subtasks that you plan to convert, and have the Automation Rule note their current parent's key in the new custom Text field.
Do a bulk change to convert the Subtasks to Tasks
Do a bulk change to convert the original Tasks to Epics.
Use an Automation Rule to access the converted subtasks and set their Parent field to the key you noted in the custom Text field.

Automation is not a good solution for automating the change of issue type (converting subtasks to tasks, or tasks to Epics) due to the potential for the destination issue type to have a different workflow, field set, or required fields. Using the Bulk Change feature would prompt you to make the necessary changes in those areas.

You'll need to be careful about the JQLs you use to select the Subtasks to convert to Tasks and the original Tasks to convert to Epics to ensure you don't pick up a converted Subtasks in the JQL you use to select Tasks to convert to Epics.

All comments

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Clara Fernández

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Parent and child issues must come from directly adjacent levels. As such, Epics can't have subtasks.

There is no built in single button solution for what you want to do. Brainstorming a solution...

Create a custom Text Field for and add it to the Subtasks.
Create an Automation Rule that selects the subtasks that you plan to convert, and have the Automation Rule note their current parent's key in the new custom Text field.
Do a bulk change to convert the Subtasks to Tasks
Do a bulk change to convert the original Tasks to Epics.
Use an Automation Rule to access the converted subtasks and set their Parent field to the key you noted in the custom Text field.

Clara Fernández_czhmd8

Hi @Trudy P Claspill

Thank you so much for your suggestion!

I am trying this, just with one variation: swapping steps 3 and 4, which is more convenient for me for reasons I won't get into right now. Should work the same way in theory, right?

However I am finding two issues:

1. When converting subtasks to tasks, the assignee gets cleared, even though both issue types have the 'assignee' field present. Not sure if this is a bug, but it doesn't happen when converting tasks to epics.

2. I am not able to set an automation rule as suggested in step 5. I have done some Googling and even asked ChatGPT for help, but I didn't manage to make it work. Any suggestions?