Can we automate the Target start date based on the end of previous sub task end date

[Devanish Sahoo]

I am looking for automating the dates in 100+ subtasks in JIRA where in my start date on 2nd sub task starts only when the first sub task is finished

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Devanish Sahoo -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Would you please clarify your use case a bit?  That may help the community to offer ideas.

1. You apparently have a story/task with more than 100 subtasks.  Correct?
2. There is a "first" subtask which has a target start date.  Correct?
3. You somehow have a way to indicate the ordering of those subsequent subtasks.  If so, how are you doing that?
4. When you note the "2nd sub task starts only when the first sub task is finished", how do mean the first subtask is finished: based upon status/completion or based upon a planned due date?

From what you describe thus far, I am unclear how this could be done with the out-of-the-box automation for Jira features.  There is a processing limit of 100 issues for triggers, branches, lookups, and so with more than 100 subtasks you may not find the "next" one to process...

Unless...you have a separate field indicating processing order (#3 above).  In that case, the number may not matter as you only are concerned with the current and next issues.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Devanish Sahoo]

Hi @Bill Sheboy ,

Thanks so much for your descriptive reply. Apologies for not being clear. Here are my responses to your queries:

1. You apparently have a story/task with more than 100 subtasks.  Correct? I have multiple stories with sub-tasks assigned to them. In all, the number of sub-tasks sum up to nearly 100+
2. There is a "first" subtask which has a target start date.  Correct? Yes
3. You somehow have a way to indicate the ordering of those subsequent subtasks.  If so, how are you doing that? I don't have any specific way of ordering the subsequent sub-tasks, its purely based on my excel list and target start dates and target end dates, I upload this excel file to JIRA via import from csv file
4. When you note the "2nd sub task starts only when the first sub task is finished", how do mean the first subtask is finished: based upon status/completion or based upon a planned due date? Its based on the target end date. 

So basically what I want to achieve is If my subtask number 1 is scheduled to end today but somehow it extends to next week then how can I automate the target start date of sub task 2 to automatically take the date when my sub task ends based on its movement to completion mode in JIRA. So that I don't have to manually change the dates in JIRA for all the sub-tasks beneath the Sub task 1 incase if it extends. 

I am basically using roadmaps to visualize the whole task for better way of management.

Regards

Devanish

[Bill Sheboy]

Thanks for that information, Devanish. 

Essentially you want Jira automation to cascade change the start/due dates of the subtasks based upon a change to an "anchor" subtask, as would a tool like Microsoft Project.  There are probably marketplace addons for Jira to make this much easier, and I recall that the roadmap team posted about an experiment to do this from a roadmap view.

Doing this one story at a time, this might be possible with automation rules, although there are lots of opportunities to make this change out of sync and break the chain of dates.  One possible way is to use a "delta date" custom field, which is set in any sibling subtasks, and use that as a trigger to update each issue's dates individually.  I have not personally tried that to shift the dates in a chain of issues.