Subtask work logged should subtract from parent task Remaining field

mike_38fgmh

Much googling and perusing the forums, I am not alone in this thought.

The way it works right now:

Parent task Time Tracking, before logging against a subtask:

After logging 1 week of time to a subtask:

Surely many many people do not prefer this behavior.  Can we please get it so Parent "Remaining" is reduced, instead of its "Estimated" increased?

My company, and I'm sure many others, dole out large chunks of time for a sizeable project.  This would be the parent task.  It only makes sense to then break that up into more manageable tasks, aka subtasks.  The work against those subtasks would subtract from the total available time allotted to the project, i.e. subtract from parent's Remaining.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

It's a bit more complex than that.

The plain Jira behaviour you have at the moment is what a lot of people want from it.  Also, remember that the estimate for the parent is not the same as its subtasks, it is independent of the subtask estimates, and what you're seeing in the box when you say "include", is simply the sum of all the estimates on parent and subtasks.  So when you estimate a sub-task, it at least makes sense that it "adds" to the parent (it doesn't, it adds to the accumulated numbers)

I would like to see this behaviour changed to something more flexible that could be configured for any of the more popular implementations.  Some people want no estimate on the parent, some want the estimates to accumulate as you've described, some want it to increase the parents accumulation, some want the actual parent numbers to change, not just the accumulation.

There's another problem on top of that.  Some of us use estimation as our Scrum statistic.  In scrum, you commit to delivering a set of stories, and you either deliver or you do not.  That makes estimates on sub-tasks utterly pointless (you don't deliver bits of a story), so you want to turn it off completely and estimate on the parent only.

So, whatever needs doing is not a simple "change it to work this way", it needs to accommodate (almost) everyone.  I'd like to see something done, but I've not seen anything that won't break it for other people or make the interface a right pain in the neck.