Stories and Sub-tasks in multiple sprints

[gwalton-bare]

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.

[Ollie Guan]

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.

[Troy Rose]

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?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

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.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You need to remember what sub-tasks and stories are.

A story is an item that needs some attention.  It is something that you tell your people you are committing to work on during a sprint.

A sub-task is part of a story.  It is not independent of the story, it is part of what you are committing to.  It therefore cannot be in a different sprint to its story.  That's either complete nonsense, or it renders commitments and sprints utterly pointless.

When someone says "I want a sub-task in a different sprint", what they actually mean is "I am not splitting up my stories well enough to fit them all into a sprint".  You need to split your stories up more, or run sprints that can contain them in full.