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Sub-Tasks on backlog

Casey-Lea Olson

How can I show sub-tasks on the backlog view?

I have a design team who get tasks on a dev user story for the design. I have setup the board so that anything labelled with design shows on their board and backlog, however they are not seeing this on their board, it is only the sub-task labelled but I can't get subtasks to show in this view.

Accepted answers

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

You will need to find a field that displays the sub-tasks as part of their parent issue.

Sub-tasks are normally not displayed on a backlog view and it doesn't make sense to try to rank them or put them into a sprint outside their parent; so even if you do show them in a backlog, there's nothing you can usefully do with them.

All comments

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

You will need to find a field that displays the sub-tasks as part of their parent issue.

Casey-Lea Olson

Thank you Nic. I tend to agree with you, and its good to get the same answer from the community, it just confirms what I was telling them to start with.

Just not sure how to deal with design tasks though. Do they get logged as their own stories in their own backlog and once done a story is logged for dev? The devs have specified that they will not accept a story into the sprint without the design completed?

Any other ideas are welcome

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

That sounds like design tasks are done outside the developers sprint. You could do them as sub-tasks, with the designers working on them outside the dev sprint and the devs ignoring them until that sub-task is closed. Or separate them completely, having their own issue type or even project, then your developers could ignore any story that does not have a link to a closed design task.

Max Richardson

I don't agree that it is nonsense to put a sub-task into a sprint outside of their parent. Similar to Casey-Lea's situation, our focus is on design sub-tasks. Design is intimately linked to the corresponding story so it is right that it is expressed as a sub-task. To separate it out would be unnecessarily complex.

At the same time, the design needs to take place at least one sprint ahead of the work on the parent Story. So subtasks in backlogs/sprints (would) serve two purposes - they highlight which stories in the backlog have yet to be designed, and they reserve a place in the sprint in which they are completed.

Is it really the case that subtasks can be displayed indented in this manner? And if not, what was the configuration (that I have a vague memory of) that allowed handling of subtasks in exactly this manner?

Mani_Vannan

@Lisa Schaffer is this something you can help? I did find you answering something similar in the forum

Irka Bek

Hi,

I think I found a way to filter in backlog view according to sub-task assignee, I've used: or issueFunction in parentsOf("assignee = IRINA") and saw dev stories in backlog view where IRINA is an assignee of a sub-task and not necessarily assignee of the dev story

unknown

Hello all!!

A possibility better solution is to simply added the JQL similar to

"Epic Link" in (XXXX-0001, EMPTY)

Sub-tasks do not have an Epic links.....but neither do epics!

This works in my Kanban and Scrum boards showing the Parent User Story and Sub-tasks !

Hope this helps ^_^

border_water

@[deleted]

can you please explain on how to implement the above JQL ?

thanks

Mani_Vannan

This is individuals view. Yes, its possible for an individual to create a filter for his viewing.But my requirement is the team wants to view it on scrum board (holistically).

Ram Subramanian

Subtasks have to be planned for like tasks and epics. It is absurd to say that subtasks are irrelevant. I do hope Atlassian corrects this huge gap and includes sub-task in backlog and board

Ram Subramanian

Maybe there could be an option to include subtasks or not include subtasks. But making a unilateral and unfounded assumption that it is irrelevant is incorrect.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

I don't think you understand what a backlog is for.

Casey-Lea Olson

Interesting point - Our design team stopped using Jira altogether and moved to Asana because we could not find way to work with them and Jira, while they are 'part of the dev team' they are not 100% assigned to that team and as a design team they also needed to be able to plan (outside of the project team) as well as have an overall view of what was going on in design.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

I'm sorry that your design team have moved to a weaker tool, it must be a right pain having a team that's not working properly with others.

Casey-Lea Olson

I am also sorry I do believe that its at least 50 / 50 - 50% the tool couldn't do exactly what they wanted and 50% they didn't want to try and figure out another way

Babis Paravalos

It seems that this has been an ongoing request for 7 years now. I find it hard to believe that a company that provides a solution to make agile software development possible, is not agile itself (unless, they just don't want to add this feature, but they don't tell us why).

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

Yes, Atlassian are well known for not doing requests. My favourite example was one that took 15 years (and gathered huge numbers of votes).

However, the age of this one is not important. They've not included a subtask display in the backlog because it's not a lot of use. A backlog is intended to be used to rank your issues in importance and then build sprints from them. Subtasks are part of their story in a backlog.

You're not interested in ranking them in the backlog, because you can't. Their overall rank is defined by their story, relative to others, and you can only rank subtasks within their story
Equally, go into a sprint as part of their story, so there's no point seeing them for that either.

In fact, Atlassian did try displaying them in the backlog briefly, and got a resounding "get rid of this noise" from all their scrum teams. So they removed the automatic display but left open the option to put the list into the view if you need it.

Go to Configure Board -> Card Layout and add a new field to the "backlog" section. You should find "Sub-tasks" on the list.

This will display a list of all the subtasks on each story in the backlog. You can't do much with them because of the stuff above, but you can see them and click their links to view their details.

Babis Paravalos

Thank you for your reply. I was not aware for this. Thanks for sharing!

It's good, but still not what I was after. I wanted to have the subtasks visible so I can see them in every person's backlog, for example when I have a parent task and 5 subtasks, and I've assigned each of them to different people, I'd like to go to each person's backlog and see the subtask in their backlog, along with status and estimates. But I can only see the parent task, so if person B is assigned a subtask then it's not straight forward to someone that looks in their backlog, to see that they have that task in the sprint as well! So showing just the subtasks is not very helpful for this use case.

BTW, the remaining estimate that is show is only from the parent task, it's not including the sub tasks, however if you go to individual task view, there is a checkbox to include the sub tasks' estimate to the remaining estimate (but only on this view).

Well, it seems that everyone has their own angle of view and how the utilize each component. Thanks for the help anyway!

Dave F_a4l7jh

If your project uses Epics and Sub-tasks, that idea appears not to work out so well. Good thinking though

Michael Sanchez_ug1507

It *is* a pain working with the chaos that cross-functional teams, that might not be Agile-focused, often present. All the more reason for JIRA to offer the flexibility to organize data any way we might then need to - even if that end is the very functional and common exercise of coping with cross-team dysfunction or misalignment. How "weak" of JIRA not to consider solving for the obvious needs of their customers.

Michael Fasani_6k9hh4

It was enough for me to see them like this. I can see I have 4 tasks, 2 complete.

Screenshot 2021-01-06 at 10.55.52.png

I show: status. labels and sub-tasks.

Goto: Board Settings > Card Layout and choose the fields you want to display.

Joe Shields

Not useful feedback Nic. This entire thread is a collection of people who use backlogs and have reason to see subtasks in the backlog view. My team prioritizes and adds point estimates in the backlog view. I'd like to point and prioritize sub-tasks along with stories. Do I also not understand what a backlog is for?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

I know that was terse, and very grumpy, but it is still right. It is grumpy because I am so very tired of explaining it so so so many times.

Subtasks have no place in a backlog, because they are not items you commit to doing outside of their parent story.

Your teams are doing everything right, but you need to forget sub-tasks, they are not what you are saying what you will do, they are just parts of their parent items.

Could you explain how that is wrong?

Aaron Reynaldos

Funny enough, I found this thread because I want to get rid of the sub-tasks in the backlog. I am not certain when they started to appear, but they add too much noise for the reasons stated by @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- before: you work with stories in the backlog, and you plan your sprint based on stories not subtasks.

The usual behaviour was to show sub-tasks in the Active Sprints view, but not in the backlog - which I believe makes sense from a Scrum approach.

But now they do show in both Active Sprints and Backlog.

So, how do I remove sub-tasks from my backlog? If I modify the filter to exclude them, they won't show in the "Active Sprints", where they do have a value.

Thanks!

ppanzella

So is there any solution to this at all?

Here's my thing...I need to do what's best for me, my team, and how our company does business. Right now, Jira does not function the way I need it to but unfortunately this software is what my company has chosen to use, so I'm stuck with it.

So I'm asking this question again for everyone who still wants a solution to this issue... How do you make subtasks and the estimated hours with them viewable from the backlog view?

The issue I run into is that while we have a development task, there are steps like QA, Code Review, and Development that are all done by different resources over the lifecycle of that task. I need to be able to see at the beginning of a sprint exactly what work is on a resource's plate. At the end of the sprint, I need to see exactly what work each resource has completed. I currently can't do it the way Jira is currently configured.

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- - PLEASE do not respond to this comment unless you're actually providing a solution to the problem and not just providing yet another overly pious response on how we're all wrong and not doing Agile or Scrum the right way.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

I'm going to have to rise to that because you've explicitly called on me.

This is a scrum tool and it works as such; what you're looking to do falls outside its functionality. As you have more nuanced needs, you could explore automating a solution that allows you to make Jira work the way you want to use it for your process.

Nick_21klde

At the moment we scope that stories are defined by business demand and we put story points on stories and time estimates on task. Each story has automation (typically set by labels we've defined) that creates "tasks" with a relationship of "sub-task/parent of." The automation checks for label and if task type doesn't already exist in the relationship it creates it and it is available in the sprint like any other task (could even make this a different issue type if you'd like).

Screen Shot 2021-04-23 at 2.41.17 PM.png

Here is a sample of one of the automation in case that helps. At this point we only actually use "sub-task" then for personal separation of work. This does the trick for us and allows us to create a template for each task type so there is a consistency. We have things like the following but you can configure to your teams needs:

Requirements Gathering
Solution Design
Development
Functional Testing
UAT
Deployment

areynaldos

@ppanzella , unfortunately, I have to agree with Nic on this one. You are having issues because what you are trying to do does not match an Agile pattern.

What I would suggest you do is:

Split your task onto multiple subtasks, each of them reflecting what each team member / step of the process it should belong to.
People can then log their time on the subtask
You can also have people log their time in the main task, and then use the JIRA reports to break it down by resource.
Timesheets comes to mind.
Otherwise, you can write your own reports using the JIRA API to summarize / break down the work spent by subtask, person, etc.
Some JIRA reporting tools and plugins will automatically roll up the time to the parent task, or give you the option to report individually.

If you're not happy breaking down in subtasks, you can always break your tasks into multiple ones, each of them with a suffix indicating each of the steps. This would lead to a different kind of nightmare, depending on the size of your team and the amount of tasks you have, but it's another option.

All of this sounds complicated because, as mentioned before, that's not the way it is supposed to work, but at least subtasks and custom reporting or plugins will give you a solution

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