Can I move a sub-task to different sprint than parent?

[Monica Rainey]

Can I move a sub-task to different sprint than parent? I can't even see the sub-task on the Plan board. Please help.

[Chung Park Chan · Accepted solution]

This is not possible. As of now, you can only see subtasks in the issue detail view on the right panel.

[Peter Armistead]

I have the opposite problem, in that a subtask has appeared in a different sprint to it's story. We don't want this and don't know how it happened. Is there any way of correcting this?

[Kim Poulsen]

Large tasks spanning multiple sprints should be Epics. Looking at Agile Scrum this is what they are meant for.

We use Epics for large stories spanning multiple sprints, stories for the work breakdown going into the sprint, and sub-tasks are reserved for the individual to further break down a story if wanted/needed.

This way large tasks can span multiple sprints, we can follow the progress using the epic report, we can plan stories intertwined with others and we can support individual per-story work breakdown as neeed.

Maybe you can use this approach too to achieve what you want.

[Andrew Cohen]

That's a shame, if I have one large task that spans multiple sprints, I would like to be able to have some subtasks in each sprint.

Right now, the closest I can get to that is to just keep moving the large task from sprint to sprint. But this distorts the "work remaining" calculations of the current sprint if I know some of it will have to be moved to the next sprint.

[Błażej O_]

One of the key ideas of scrum is to release a working software after a sprint. It requires all tasks (stories) in the sprint to be fully completed, along with their subtasks. If you have a large task, that consists of many smaller parts, and it's too big to deliver in one sprint, that means you have an EPIC, not a task, my friend :)

[Ram Pantangi]

Epic has the same issue though. You can't have multiple sub-tasks or Jiras under the same epic in different sprints. I am not sure why Atlassian doesn't respond properly to this very common scenario. The way you would need is..

-- some top level "soft Epic" that has no concept of it's own sprint, but just a grouping of different sub-tasks or jiras.

-- different sub-tasks can be in different sprints if necessary, and the planning board will show the soft Epic (may be JIRA software needs a new type) and all the sub-tasks that belong to each sprint in the corresponding Sprint.

This does need special handling. I can use labels, but labels don't aggregate the total combined effort of all the sub-tasks or jiras.

Atlassian, can you please reply?

[Piotr_Serwa]

I have the same issue. Epics span over multiple sprints. I create subtasks (and not regular tasks) so that I can have the correct computation of total original estimate and total remaining estimate of the subtasks (so that I can check it against the Epic's original estimate. So I cannot put the subtasks in diffeent sprint.

[Alan Osman]

I should be able to spread my task across multiple sprints because there are cases when we want to defer some functionality but group under the same EPIC to track it.  

A case example would be adding CRUD to some feature, but the D part can be deferred to a later sprint because we are looking to b-line a set of features to test a thesis. We later may want to come back to unfinished items in a future sprint.

As it stands we have to create multiple EPICs to handle this. Seems weak.  

[Wayne Maharaj]

Same here, I have an epic with subtasks, but subtasks inherit sprint from epic. 

[toogooda]

You can achieve this in another way, by Creating a task (not sub-task) then linking it to the story. In this way you can delivery components in separate Sprints and keep track of them. When you select the story it will show all the linked tasks and their statuses.

Sub-Tasks are designed for assigning parts of a sprint effort like dev and testing that take place in one sprint.