How do you show sub-tasks in Agile boards?

[Nick Mannings]

Hi forum!

On older versions of Greenhopper, you can see Sub-Tasks on the Planning & Task boards. This was useful since we broke down larger stories into sub-tasks, and estimated the sub-tasks. Also sub-tasks for the same issue could be scheduled in different sprints by dragging them into different releases.

But with the new Agile Boards feature, it's not possible to view subtasks. Estimates for larger stories are done at the sub-task level, and this is not visible on the board when trying to plan the sprints.

Does anybody know if there's a way to show sub-tasks, or can anybody recommend a different way of working with the new board feature?

Thanks!

[saraponga · Accepted solution]

I don't know how to display the sub-tasks, but I can share how we work.

A story is typically small enough for the team to be able to handle within one sprint. It almost sounds like your stories were actually epics, and your sub-tasks were stories.

Instead of estimating the sub-tasks, stick to estimating the stories only. You can always link different stories together via the GH-custom field "epic/theme", or create your own field for this, if you need some way to see that certain stories belong together. Where I work, we use the "epic/theme" field to gather groups of stories.

[Nick Mannings]

Thanks for the advice Sara.

I also found this question with a very informative answer about time estmation and why you can't see sub-tasks in Rapid Boards

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/84349/rapid-board-time-estimates-with-sub-tasks

[Renjith Pillai]

And Epics are not supported by GH at the moment, but they are coming soon...

[mbaylis]

Your subtasks may be filtered out, based on how your board is setup. If you are filtering on an epic, subtasks can't be assigned to an epic, so they won't appear. But if you don't filter on an epic, the subtasks will appear nested underneath each story that owns them.

[Neil Padgen]

You can see subtasks in Plan Mode on a per-story basis by clicking the little clipboard icon. https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/91805/viewing-sub-tasks-on-the-rapid-board-in-plan-mode