Kanban Board Subtask Question

[Scott Harper]

Our team is small and a recent adopter of Jira. We have a fairly standard story flow on our Kanban board

Backlog -> Next Stories -> Current Stories -> Stories Complete ->Test ->Done

When a story in in the' Current Stories' state we can break it down into subtasks if required. Subtasks have a different simpler workflow. Once all subtasks are done the parent auto-transitions to Story Complete

Subtask ToDo -> SubTask Doing -> SubTask Done

I've got everything working as it should bar one really annoying issue. When we move a subtask to Done it's closed. When all the issues are done and the parent transitions to story complete.

However I can't get the subtasks to be removed from the board - they just stay there filling up the 'SubTask Done' column.

I realise this is expected behaviour - the subtasks meet the mapped state of the column so are displayed. My thought to get around this was to introduce a further state in the subtask workflow called 'Parent Complete' which all subtasks would auto transition to when the parent story is marked complete and not map this state to the board. However this seems not to be avaialble OTB. I've seen plugins which could auto-transition subtasks when parents tranision but hoping there might be a cost free solution I'm missing.

Is there anything I'm overlooking in Jira that could help me solve this issue? Can I add a column contraint that requires the parent to be in a certain state for the subtask to be displayed on the board? Is there another way to remove closed subtasks from the kanban board?

edit: I'm currently investigating adding a quick filter which constrains the parent task to be in a certain state - is this a good solution/possible

[Henning Tietgens · Accepted solution]

How about adapting your board filter (or creating a quickfilter) to exclude the subtasks which are done from the board? Something like "and not (issuetype in subTaskIssueTypes() and status = Closed)"

Henning

[Scott Harper]

Thanks for the response Henning - much appreciated. I was editing my previous question as I had just found filters and thought that might be the way to go.

I'm hoping I can do something along the lines of

parentState ==Next Stories || parentState== Current Stories (I realise this won't be the syntax - I've got some learning to do)

I'm going to have a go at this and will update the post if I manage to get this working (and I'll upvote you then too).

[Henning Tietgens]

OTB it's not possible to query for the status of the parent issue. But you can use the "subtasksOf(Subquery)" JQL function from the Script Runner plugin to query for all subtask of parents matching a query. So

issueFunction in subtasksOf("status=Next Stories OR status=Current Stories")

should do the trick.

[Scott Harper]

Thanks again Henning .This looks like it will do the trick. I had been looking at the paid J-Tricks as I realised what I wanted to do wasn't available OTB but your answer is much more suited to our needs. Much appreciated - you've save me hours of extra work and additonal cost.

[Scott Harper]

Using Script Runner the final JQL that worked for me was:

type = story OR issueFunction in subtasksOf("status = 'Next Stories' or status = 'Current Stories' or status = 'Reopened'")

Hope this helps someone :)