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What is the rationale behind not showing subtasks on the Kanban board by default?

fs_Florida

I understand why epics don’t appear on the Kanban board as they’re large containers meant to group smaller stories/tasks. What I don’t understand is why subtasks also don’t appear on the Kanban board.

To me, it seems useful for a team to see when a subtask moves from a To-Do stage to an In-Progress stage, for example.

So, how should I break my epics, stories, and subtasks in a way that is transparent and makes sense, considering the stage of subtasks will not show on the Kanban board and therefore will be hidden from the team in that view (PS: I know I can see their stage in the list view)? And why would I want subtasks to be hidden from the Kanban board in the first place?

Accepted answers

Bill Sheboy

Hi @fs_Florida

First thing, I do not work for Atlassian; I'm just another Jira user. Thus, my ideas are not based upon what choices the Atlassian staff have made. With that out of the way...

From my perspective, Kanban is a limited WIP, pull-based method to visualize the delivery of value over a specific workflow / value stream.

And, when one considers work breakdown into things such as a "sub-task", that likely implies a piece of work that is not individually releasable / valuable to a customer of the delivery team, such as would be for its parent "task". Teams using Kanban rely upon the visualization and measures to manage value delivery and improve flow, such as: WIP, lead time, cycle time, Age of WIP, etc. If sub-tasks could individually move through the workflow, they would need to both be ignored from measures AND repeatedly checked against the parent task so its progress / measures could be assessed. The alternative is the visual and measures no longer reflect value-delivery as they include incomplete-delivery.

Instead of moving sub-tasks on a Jira interpretation of a Kanban board, one could try:

decompose work into smaller, valuable / releasable chunks, eliminating the need for sub-tasks
use checklists on the tasks to represent the dependent work

Kind regards,
Bill

All comments

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @fs_Florida

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

What type of Space does this concern? Click the ... button next to the Space Name in the navigation panel on the left. Tell us what the last two lines in the pop-up say. It will say something like

Software space
Company-managed

Subtasks can be shown on a Kanban board for a Software space. For a Team-Managed space you must select Group: Subtasks to show the subtasks as cards on the board.

Screenshot 2026-02-17 at 7.36.34 AM.png

On a Kanban board for a Company-managed Software space they should show by default, if they are within the scope of the board filter.

fs_Florida

Thank you, @Trudy P Claspill ! The subtasks appear by default in a Company-managed Software space. I'm able to do that.

My question is more in the sense of why wouldn't I want to show the subtasks on the kanban board by default in the other types of spaces? If that's not the default setting for JIRA, then I assume there is some project management or agile concept reason for that.

Matt Doar _Adaptavist_

My guess is that it's to try to reduce visual complexity by default

Trudy P Claspill

I can't speak to the design decisions made by Atlassian when they developed Team-managed projects.

There is a change request about showing Subtasks without using the Group option. You could add your vote to it.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-85702

Bill Sheboy

Hi @fs_Florida

First thing, I do not work for Atlassian; I'm just another Jira user. Thus, my ideas are not based upon what choices the Atlassian staff have made. With that out of the way...

From my perspective, Kanban is a limited WIP, pull-based method to visualize the delivery of value over a specific workflow / value stream.

Instead of moving sub-tasks on a Jira interpretation of a Kanban board, one could try:

decompose work into smaller, valuable / releasable chunks, eliminating the need for sub-tasks
use checklists on the tasks to represent the dependent work

Kind regards,
Bill

fs_Florida

This makes perfect sense, @Bill Sheboy , thanks!

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