Scrum boards for tasks and subtasks

[Anthony Sennett]

I've inherited our Jira, which is currently a bit of a disaster. One thing I want to sort out is our main development board used by our dev team. I'm new to configuring Jira.

We use Scrum. When developing new features, we have functional user stories from the Product Owners, then as developers we have a meeting and create technical subtasks per functional user story. This is great, but there are two issues with our Jira implementation.

(When I say "board", I mean a board with cards that you move along. "Todo", "In development", "Review", etc etc)

1) Currently the functional user stories and the stories' subtasks are on the same board. This is confusing - currently we have a bunch of userstories in "To do", and some of them have some technical tasks that are under developement, some tech tasks are done. Visibility and estimation is next to impossible with this uber-board. It seems to me that there should be one board for functional stories, and then another mini board per functional user story itself that tracks that story's subtasks.

2) Not all functional user stories have any subtasks. I know that we can get around this by making one technical task under each functional story, but I want to know if there is better way of handling this heirachy.

You can see an actual screenshot of our board here: http://imgur.com/iAFJ7tm

How do people handle this? What are some seach terms to get some ideas?

Cheers!

[Svante Gustafsson Björkegren · Accepted solution]

Hi Anthony,

I agree, the board gets quite messy with sub-tasks added to it.

You should try divide it into two boards as you are thinking about.

Let your first board just contain Stories (and maybe Epics if you are using that) You will have to update your filter used in the board to accomplish this, just add:

AND issuetype in (Story, Epic)

to your filter definition.

This will remove all your sub-tasks from that board.

In your second board you will make sure you see all Stories and Sub-tasks. When you have created this board you can put yur stories in Swimlanes instead. That will put the Sub-tasks grouped in a neat way under each story. You find the Swimlane setting under Configure/Swimlanes.

Hope this helped you a bit!

Cheers,

// Svante

[Svante Gustafsson Björkegren]

Another comment:

Consider using a Kanban board for your second board. The sprint concept in JIRA Agile is per board and you may get some conflicting behaviors using two Scrum boards. For the same tickets.

I usually create a "tracking" kanban board in these situations. You can add the following JQL in your filter for the Kanban board

and sprint in openSprints()

to make sure it only shows tickets from the ongoing sprint.

[Anthony Sennett]

Awesome thanks so much. I'll experiment with this.

[Anthony Sennett]

Awesome thanks so much. I'll experiment with this.