Best ways to have several issues & subtasks created or reused repetitively.

[David Quiram]

Context:

We have a team that uses a JWM project for a specific process that happens 3 to 4 times a year. 

This project they have built contains about 15 to 20 issues and each of those issues has anywhere between 2 and 12 subtasks each. 

Why so many issues? They like having the ability to assign each of these smaller pieces to individuals and they could all come with their own deadlines. 

They have several starting statuses based around their needs and a one done status. 

Why several starting statuses and not use in progress statuses? We let them setup their project how they wanted. If you can give a good use case for changing this, let me know. 

Question:

Would it be better to have all those issues be "reuseable" or work from fresh issues each time the process needs to be done and what methods would you recommend for your proposed option? 

I have a few thoughts on how to handle this and would love to solicit community feedback. 

Reuse Issues

So that you don't have to recreate each issue and subtask, you could just go to the task and set the status back to it's starting status. In this way, the issues/subtasks act as a checklist more than anything else. The problem I foresee with this is that there are a lot of issues/subtasks and that would be a very tedious task. Bulk action wouldn't work because not all the tasks start at the same starting status. I don't know of a means to "reset" a task back to it's original status. 

New Issues

With this approach, we have various methods of identifying the new round of tasks from the previous, like using tags, categories, formatted task titles, etc... I know the creation of the issues/subtasks could be managed via automation, but it would be a very dense automation block to create all the tasks when they are ready for their next run of the process. I know I can build it, but is there a better means of handling this situation? Something I'm not considering or thinking of? 

Feedback:

So now I come to you oh wise community and ask for your opinions. Am I considering all the options or am I overlooking some features or methods that would simplify this entire project? Thank you for your time and consideration. 

[Kian Stack Mumo Systems · Accepted solution]

@David Quiram, 

I would recommend creating them as separate issues. The reasons for doing so are many. New issues represent new items of work. If there needs to be any discussion or updates, tracking those all on a new ticket is much more preferable to having tasks that reopen every few months.

In terms of creating an automation, it really does not have to be intense. You could create a "template project" to house the tickets you want to create on a recurring basis. You can write something pretty simple like this:

[David Quiram]

Ah! That makes a lot more sense. I knew you could clone a single issue, but I didn't think to think if it would be possible to clone an entire project's issues at once. In this example, if I wanted the cloned Issues summary to dynamically have the name of the month/year, would that be possible?

[Kian Stack Mumo Systems]

Yes, you could do that.

Try something like this:

If you want to format the date differently, please refer to this documentation.

[David Quiram]

Laying it out like that makes total sense now. Thank you so much! 

[John Funk]

Hi David,

Here's another slant at a solution that might provide what you are looking for, also. 

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Creating-a-Flexible-Recurring-Task-Issue/ba-p/2040862