Sub tasks in Microservice structured projects.

[Ido Flaishon]

I have a problem defining the ways of working in JIRA with my team. The issue is coming because of three points: agile practice, microservice structured JIRA projects, the function of a sub task. I would love to hear ideas how to deal with the situation.

Agile practice - Story is a vertical slice

It's the normal idea that a story should be a vertical slice. I expect a Story to be deliverable, an create value. Technical implementation should be sub tasks of the story. So if to delivery a feature I need to touch the Front-end and 3 services, I might have 4 sub-tasks attached to the story.

Sub tasks 

Sub tasks according to my understanding are always a part of the main issue, and are tightly connected to a certain project. You cannot have an issue with sub tasks from different projects.

Microservice structured projects

My team is working in microservice architecture, and opened a separate JIRA project for each service.

THE PROBLEM

I want to have a stories with sub tasks, but I can't since the sub tasks should be a part of different projects, each touching a different service and therefore a different JIRA project.

I know I can use Epics for this case, but for my understanding, epics for a larger scale issues, that might have multiple independent deliverables.

I can also link the issues and use dependencies, but then it's hard to visibly present on a board that all of these issue belong to a single User Story.

Any ideas?

Many thanks in advance!

[Nic Brough _Adaptavist_ · Accepted solution]

This is the crux of the problem:

" I can't since the sub tasks should be a part of different projects, each touching a different service and therefore a different JIRA project."

You need to decide if these issues are sub-tasks or not.  If they really are a part of a bigger issue, then your projects are set up incorrectly.  If they are dependencies, rather than part of the issue, then you should stop trying to think of them as sub-tasks.