Workflow - Do you change a parent ticket's status according to its sub-task?

Question

Hi everyone.

As someone who's new to manage Jira's workflow, I'm trying to find a way to ease up the management of Jira tickets transitions.

The objective of this question is to learn how you manage the tickets transition in your current workflow and then learn from that if I can improve how we do it.

Currently, when a developer works on a sub-task, there's no automatic status transition of the parent ticket.

I was looking on a way to have a parent ticket's status transition from Open to In Progress when its sub-task is set to In-Dev.

However, our current workflow is something I've inherited and I'm reluctant to make changes that might break it.

The workflow is tied to the columns we have in our physical scrum board - this means that any change I do to the workflow, I need to change the columns on the physical board.

We have the following:

Given these columns, what changes you would make to assist in reporting if the User Story ticket is in progress because its sub-task is in development?

I hope I was clear with my question and I'll gladly revise it if it's not clear.

Thanks!

Henry_xpgoua · Answer

Personally, I regard this as a defect. Sub-tasks cannot exist outside of the context of their parent issue, so they are necessarily an implementation detail of that issue. If any sub-task moves to 'In Progress' then the parent issue must also be 'In Progress'. The same question has been asked before:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/Automation-for-Jira-Transition-parent-issue-automatically-when/qaq-p/675279

And the solution is to use 'Automation for JIRA':

https://blog.codebarrel.io/synchronize-parent-and-sub-task-issues-with-automation-for-jira-bdcca6c9d453

Since its acquisition by Atlassian, this is included in JIRA Cloud but not in the Server (or Data Centre) editions. We are using Data Centre edition so cannot fix the 'bug' without paying $$$. I'm disappointed in this.