How can I track the sub-tasks of a sub-task in Jira?

[Smitha Joseph]

How can I track the sub-tasks of a sub-task in Jira?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Smitha Joseph 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Jira does not allow you to insert levels into the default issue type hierarchy, which is

Level 1 : Epic
|-- Level 0 : standard issue types like Story and Bug
    |-- Level -1 : subtask issue types

You can't create sub-tasks that are children of sub-tasks.

You could create other types of issues and link them to your sub-tasks, but Jira would not consider that a parent/child relationship.

Can you reorganize the issue types you are using, so that what you currently create at the subtask level is instead created at the standard level, and so on up the hierarchy?

If not, can you provide more information about your use case?

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Smitha Joseph

as Trudy suggested, the only way to model "sub-sub-tasks" is through issue linking. The problem, as mentioned before, is that Jira doesn't really recognise issue links as parent/child relationships, and thus doesn't provide relevant features.

I would generally recommend to stick with Atlassian's hierarchy model, where additional levels are generally added on top of the epic level.

This being said, if you want to explore an issue-link-based hierarchy,  there are apps available on the Atlassian Marketplace that can help with this. I'll provide more information below.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Hannes

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

... and to expand on my last point: If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you'll find a number of apps that can display issue-link-based hierarchies. E.g., my team and I work on an app in which this would be easy to do, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a number of advanced features, including support for (configurable) issue hierarchies. These issue hierarchies can be based on Jira's built-in parent/child relationships (like task/sub-task, or epic/story), and/or based on issue links of configurable issue link types.

This is how this looks in action:

(WORK-364 and WORK-363 are connected to each other via an issue link.)

Any questions just let me know!