To break work down into managable tasks while retaining a nice and clean link back to the overarching story, we use sub-tasks. For the life of me, I can't figure out how to view, rank or otherwise assign those sub-tasks to a sprint individually.
After trawling these boards and seeing a cascade of similar compliants I am trying to determine a few things:
- Is it intentional that sub-tasks cannot be used with the new rapid boards?
- Is this ever going to be changed?
- If not, is it Scrum idelology or some underlying design limitation (I really hope it's the latter)
More details about what we do
The problem I have now is that the only way to solve this problem is to have the all my sub-tasks appear as major tasks. This causes a couple of issues.
Firstly, there is no nice clean way to link them to their parent as core parts of the same overall task.
Secondly, as a matter of policy we force people to record story descriptions according to a certain template. This helps ensure the high-quality of stories and helps properly categorise them as stories. Basically, we only allow people to register issues of Epics, Stories or Defects. From here, we break the story down into a bunch of small tasks (similar story to many) which may be of various differnet types (New Feature, Improvement, Documentation Task, etc...). This puts a real organisational distinction between what is requirements (Stories) and what is implementation (everything else) and overall results in a higher quality of reporting and a simpler process for everyone.
If I have to move all sub-tasks to regular tasks so that I can do crazy things like assign them to sprints, I'll have to make it possible for all the various types to be registered. The only way from then on to keep this policy is to enforce it with a big stick, which is fine and all, but creates a lot more work.
I'm fine with this if it's just an internal technical limitation. I can understand that and live with it, but if it's because I'm not doing "Atlassian-certified" Scrum... Well, I get a little frustrated then, so I'm just trying to figure out where it all stands and what the likihood is that it'll ever get changed.
The sad part is, if rapid boards didn't look so awesome I wouldn't care.
