How to best do user story tasking for Scrum teams in JIRA?

Question

Hi all,

New to using JIRA and previously used Rally (https://www.rallydev.com) with Scrum teams were we could easily do "tasking" of user stories in the tool during sprint planning. This included task to story estimate roll-ups and ability to move stories with their associated tasks or split them appropriately based on status of task completion. I'm currently trying to replicate the same functionality with another team that is using JIRA but this is proving harder than expected in JIRA.

As I understand it in JIRA we can use sub-tasks to create user story tasks:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/creating-issues-and-sub-tasks-764478439.html

No problem creating issues (stories) or sub-tasks (tasks) in JIRA. Managed to do this just fine.

The problem arises when you try to move stories between states. The tasks don't follow stories automatically and if you move the tasks individually the story doesn't follow automatically. At least not out of the box. You have to install a plug-in and configure advanced workflows with separate "transition" and "post-function" conditions to supposedly make this all work:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiracloud/advanced-workflow-configuration-776636620.html

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/moving-a-sub-task-to-in-progress-does-not-transition-its-parent-s-to-the-same-status-779158949.html

Further, I am not sure if durations in sub-tasks roll-up easily into their parent issues or if they easily burn down through task completion and if these all get reflected in their appropriate stories and metrics (e.g. burn down charts).

As previously mentioned I'm new to JIRA so if I'm overlooking the obvious please let me know but all this seems an awful amount of advanced custom configuration for a Scrum workflow that is pretty basic in other tools. This functionality must be used daily by hundreds of Scrum teams. So before getting too deep in to the weeds I wanted to consult with the community here to see if this custom configuration is the right path to pursue or if there is a simpler solution I'm overlooking for tasking user stories in JIRA?

Any expert help and opinions are appreciated!

Mat

Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_ · Accepted Answer

About your first question as you researched already there are ways to automatically transition parent issue state based on child but in JIRA the parent Issue and child issue workflows may be different and they are independent of each other.

About second question, If you are using Time (hours) for estimation then Sub-tasks estimates are rolled up to Parent. However in case of Story points, this is only available at Parent level i.e. Story. You can manually add Story Point custom field to Sub-task but that would not roll up to Parent.