Subtasks or Statuses?

Question

I'm a new Jira project manager of team managed project using a scrum board. The team develops code to be used for dashboard report content and there are multiple tasks performed by different team members throughout the process .  I'm new to Jira and trying to determine the best way to manage our workflow: 1) move the issue through statuses representing the various steps of the process - I.e. Requirements, logic, Review, Code, UAT, Deploy, etc.  or 2) use a subtask for every step and move those through basic statuses I.e. Pending, In progress, Deploy to Prod, Complete.    This sounds like it would have the best functionality for customizing the workflows and handing off the tasks from one person to the next, reassigning ownership, etc. I'm leaning towards the latter and considering creating issues by cloning from an issue designed to work like a template.

Does this sound like the best option or would anyone have advice or input to offer?

Fernando Eugênio da Silva_2ddgg8 · Answer

@Tina.Henry

This is a concept that depends heavily on how the team's business rules work.

When we talk about issue statuses, we talk about phases that the issue goes through until it reaches its end point. Changing the statuses to use sub-tasks can generate a huge wave of sub-tasks that where using by status, the action would just be to move or change a value.

See the subtask concept as:

I need to create a template for a website;
In my issue, I'm in the template creation phase;
Then I can create sub-tasks to map the creation of this template.
Issue status: In template creation
Sub-task: program template css;
Sub-task: template html program;

After the sub-tasks are completed, you can move the issue to "In template validation", for example.

You can control your development by general phases and distribute sub-tasks into small tasks.

It is a better way to manage than changing the status issue and assigning another person to each new phase of it. It becomes a very manual management that sometimes deprives you of an action value that someone else did, because everything is in the same issue and not aligned in sub-tasks

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Status is definitely the way to do this.

"move the issue through statuses representing the various steps of the process " is exactly what workflows are for!

Sub-tasks are a way to break up a story into pieces, either for simplicity, or to represent distinct parts of a story, or to allocate bits of it to different people.  They can have their own workflow and fields, separate from the story, but they are still just a part of their owning story.  They don't represent your development process.