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Moved Story to Epic and Lost Child Issues

Daniel March 16, 2022

When I migrated a Story to an Epic, all of my child issues were lost.  Is there a way to get those back or to roll back to another status?  I'm sure there is a technical reason why all of these were dropped during the "move" but right now I need to find a way to not lose all those workstreams.  

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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March 16, 2022

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I am not sure I understand what you have done here, or perhaps what you're describing.  The terminology is a bit fuzzy though, for historic reasons

Stories do not have "child issues", but they can have "sub tasks". 

Epics do have "child issues", but they are structurally a different type of issue, and can also have sub-tasks (although the UI pushes you away from using them on Epics a bit).

So, when you say "all of my child issues", do you really mean the stories had sub-tasks, or something else?

Sub-tasks won't be removed by changing stories to issues, they remain as part of the issue.

Daniel March 17, 2022

The story I "Moved" to be an "Epic" lost all of its subtasks when migrated.  The subtasks did not automatically become Stories.  Hope that's a little more clear.

Daniel March 17, 2022

The subtasks are all gone.  It appears they were deleted and I'm trying to revert the last change to try a different way of moving things to preserve.  

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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March 17, 2022

Sub-tasks would not become stories, they're sub-tasks of the issue, and the issue is still there, and Epics can have sub-tasks, so there's no need to do anything.

Jira doesn't delete issues during actions other than delete or bulk-delete.  Moving the story to an epic doesn't delete anything.

Can you go to the standard issue view of the (now) Epic and check what sub-tasks it has?  A second test would be to try to browse directly to one of the sub-tasks using its key (https://yourjira.com/browse/ABC-123 )

I think we might need some more detail on how you did the move (mostly about config rather than the actual move) if the sub-tasks really have gone.

I just tested it with a Company-managed project in a mostly off-the-shelf Jira system - create a story, added 3 sub-tasks, moved the story to an Epic, and the sub-tasks are still all there:

s2e1.png

s2e2.png

Daniel March 22, 2022

Hey @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- Thank you for your help with this.  I was able to figure out what happened and wanted to let you know.  When moving the Story to an Epic, it disassociated all of the existing Sub-Tasks and put them back into the "Backlog" with no assigned story.  (Rather than naturally promoting them into the original nesting structure).  Once I went back and assigned them manually it worked pretty okay.  Definitely a scary thing since they all just completely disappeared and were not visible in any of the standard views.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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March 23, 2022

I think I can explain that - sub-tasks are only part of a backlog when their parent issue is part of the backlog.  When you converted the Story to the Epic, you didn't orphan or disassociate any sub-tasks, but you did change their parent issue to be an item that would not go in the backlog.  So they fell out of it.

I assume you re-parented the sub-tasks, or changed them to stories (they can't exist without a parent)

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Daniel March 23, 2022

Yes.  I converted them to Stories first while they were in the backlog and then re-associated them them to the Epic.  Then went in and moved them to the right sprint. 

It's a bit of a wonky User Experience thing.  But it does make sense.  Just challenging if you're not intimately familiar with the object relationships between things in JIRA.  Logically sound, but visually/UX wise it's a bit confusing.  Definitely appreciate the conversation though.  Ultimately, nothing lost and have a better understanding of the system.  Thank you for helping with this.  

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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March 23, 2022

I think it's one of those that makes sense as you think through the structures and the history of how Jira has evolved over time.  But you'd never actively design it this way!

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Page Partain October 3, 2023

NEVER MIND: I was able to find my sub-tasks!

José Carlos De Oliveira Escalona
Contributor
April 22, 2024

Hi Daniel, I have a similar issue and I wonder how you managed to find the sub-tasks without parent. They don't show in the backlog as they got no parent, I've done a search of sub-tasks without parent and none of them seems to work....

Screenshot 2024-04-22 at 18.08.29.png

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