Stories and Sub-tasks in multiple sprints

Question

Hi All,

I am new to Jira and Dev in general but we have recently introduced sprints.

We created Epics for our strategic initiatives and assign stories to them accordingly. Many stories has sub-tasks due to the complexity and it occurs that we would need to have subtask1 in sprintA and subtask2 in sprintB.

My issue is that i cannot move a subtask only to a different sprint but the story only. I know i can do that but I would like to avoid having a story appear over and over in 3-4 consecutive sprints.

I'd appreciate some suggestions around this.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Agile (including the Scrum methodology which fits well with it) is all about being flexible and adapting to the real world.

Yes, stuff will not be completed in a sprint, but the point of Scrum is that you are able to a) explain why and b) adapt to the change because you can explain it.  The aim of a sprint is to complete what you commit to.  Not infrequently, you can't.

But, for the context of this question, we're looking at sub-tasks.  I'm not going to repeat the answer I gave 4 years ago, it still stands.

Troy Rose_bkwjov · Answer

The reality of completing all stories in a sprint is that, things happen.

You're delayed on something, you discover a problem, you're blocked, you find out you have an external dependency, you gain more understanding about the story and you realise there's more work to be done to complete it - despite you and your team's commitments, ie reality bites.

Ipso facto, the theory of agile is not inline with the real world.

So, it sounds like the tooling is not flexible enough to cater for this situations?

Ollie Guan · Answer

Hi @gwalton-bare ,

I think this is not in line with the theory of agile. Every sprint needs to produce a product increment that can be delivered, which means that the tasks under one Story are all completed.