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Unable to Close Sprint Due to Open Subtasks of an open Story

Kratika Shastri

Hi Team,

I am encountering an issue when attempting to close a Sprint. The system is preventing me from closing the Sprint if there are some open Stories (Status - Engineering Design) with open Subtasks. Ideally, any non-closed Story including non-closed Subtasks should be allowed to move to the next Sprint or the backlog.

However, the current behaviour is requiring the subtask of a open story to be closed before allowing the Sprint to close, which raises a concern: how can this be a criteria for closing the Sprint?
Criteria - The subtask is expected to be closed even if the story is not closed.

Could you please investigate this issue or clarify if this is the intended behavior?

Thank you for your assistance. image (1).png

Accepted answers

All comments

Marc -Devoteam-

Hi @Kratika Shastri

Welcome to the community. (not Atlassian Support)

Subtasks are not sprint items, they are parts of a parent ticket.

So when the parent ticket is finished but the child ticket is not, you can't close the sprint (illogical position of the subtask), but if the parent ticket is "open" and the subtask is also open, you can close the sprint and choose to send these tickets in the backlog or in the next sprint.

See, https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-91009

Or, it could be related to the workflow of the sub-taks or story used in the project.

There are probably condition set on transitions.

Dick

Hi @Kratika Shastri welcome to the Atlassian Community

It is intended behavior. Big stories with big (lists of) subtasks should be sliced in order to fit into a sprint comfortably. If the team manages to do them within the sprint, they could pull in some other tasks to fill-up the remaining time in sprint and deliver beyond their initial load.

It's more stimulating for the team this way.

Kind regards

Dick

Manoj Kumar Gangwar

Hi @Kratika Shastri Welcome to the community!

I have only seen this happen when a story/task level issue has been closed while sub-tasks of that (closed) issue are still unsolved. That is indeed a scenario you would want to avoid.

In company-managed projects, you could use a subtasks blocking condition in your parent issue's workflow to avoid stories being closed when they still have open sub-tasks underneath. Or you could reverse the logic and use an automation rule to automatically close all subtasks when you close a parent issue.

Kratika Shastri

Thanks Marc.
Yes I agree if story is closed and subtasks are open then we are not allowed to close the Sprint. But not sure why it is not allowing if the Story is also open.
I doubt if the conditions are set on transitions. But I can probably have a look.

Kratika Shastri

Thanks Manoj. But in this scenario, the Parent task is also not closed.

Dick

Subtasks throw a spanner in the works.

Jira can't just move only the subtasks that are still "open" to the next sprint AND keep the "done" subtasks as part of the sprint that just concluded. It would require another parent story to make that happen. This is in fact exactly the administrative burden you have to accomplish in order to make things right again: Having to make a clone of the parent story in the new sprint and move the unfinished subtasks to that new story. Only in this way, Jira can close off the sprint.

Best avoid this pickle all-together by slicing story properly into chunks that can well be managed within a sprint as suggested earlier. Your team will be grateful for this.

Kind regards,

Dick

Mykenna Cepek

If the parent Story is open, then the Sprint can be closed. The Story and all Sub-tasks will be moved to the next Sprint or to the Backlog as you direct.

This is consistent with the Agile perspective of a clear "Definition of Done". The idea with Scrum specifically and Agile generally is that the Story is "atomic" (either fully completed or not) and only when completed / implemented / deployed does it have business value.

Teams wanting to claim "partial credit" for unfinished Stories don't yet have the Agile mindset. As a Scrum Master I will refuse to clone Stories just to carry over unfinished Sub-tasks. Instead let's better understand right-sized Stories that can be completed in one Sprint, clarify our Definition of Done, and abandon this "partial credit" mentality.

From the business perspective: "It's not Done, so no cookie".

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