How can I plan individual technical (sub)tasks in sprint planning?

[JeenB]

I'm trying to switch to using the new Rapid board for sprint planning, but for some reason, the sprint planning view only shows the main stories in the backlog (and bugs, new features and improvements, but not technical (sub)tasks). You can see these in the details of the story of course, but I can not drag and drop these. Put another way: there seems to be no way to have the subtasks show up in the backlog as independent items.

Often, our stories are quite complex (yes, I know...) and are subdivided into several technical tasks. We want to be able to plan these individual tasks per sprint, while leaving the story itself out (because the story overarches several sprints).

Any suggestions for how this can be achieved? Config setting I'm overlooking? Alternative approaches?

[JeenB · Accepted solution]

I have been informed that this is not possible "by design", which means I have to rethink the way we build stories slightly (which is probably a good thing :) ).

[Mark Kurt]

We are facing a very similar issue. We have actually adopted the convention of not allowing a parent task to span sprints because of this. This leads to things like Feature A - Phase I, Feature A - Phase II which isn't great, but is workable. However, a bigger problem not solved by this is the fact that you can't prioritize child tasks independent of the parent (at least we have not found a way to do this). This prevents the ability put critical subtasks at the top of the priority queue. Any thoughts or ideas on how to accomplish this?