Assign subset of sub-tasks for a User Story to a sprint.

Kim Wall August 30, 2012

Is it possible to assign the sub-tasks for a particular user story to different sprints? For example, we have a project that has a User Story comprised of several sub-tasks that all together will take about 5 weeks. Their sprints are 2 weeks long. They don't want to break the story into two separate stories, but instead want to have some of the sub-tasks in one sprint, and the rest in another. Currently, they're having to let the ones they didn't get done fall into the backlog at the end of a sprint, but that's not ideal as it skews their stats. Is there a way to organize sub-tasks in the sprints separately from their parents?

Any help or clarification would be appreciated.

Thanks!

1 answer

1 accepted

0 votes
Answer accepted
cgauterio
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
September 7, 2012

Hi Kim,

Unfortunately, there is no way to do that except breaking the story in two or three small stories. All the sub-tasks need to be on the same sprint as the parent issue. If you have issues that take longer than a sprint, you probably can break the stories into small ones or your sprints need to be longer.

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Clarissa Gautério

Atlassian Support

Kevin Frey June 17, 2019

Sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but is still still the case? The more I use JIRA (Scrum Boards) the more it seems to me that each "gain" you make with respect to eg. the Planning Phase comes with a commensurate loss in the execution phase.

Why should I need to break down my stories further to support "the tool"? If my story is a complex feature that cannot be broken down into smaller pieces story-wise, then why force me to do this for sprint execution? Keep in mind that a Story is meant to be a narrative about what a user can do, so there comes a point where your Story may no longer really be a "Story" but simply a "a fragment of a Story". And you shouldn't have to change your sprint duration just because you have a Story that cannot get done in one sprint.

We are only beginning to investigate using Stories/Sub-Tasks as a _potentially_ better way of planning/prioritising our back-log because it lets our Product Owner eliminate the noise of tasks. But now creating an actual sprint out of tasks is made substantially harder because JIRA does not allow us to choose sub-tasks to include in a sprint, and it even makes it more difficult to assign/estimate sub-tasks from within the board.

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer