Create a scrum board for a single Epic?

[amol bansal]

I am trying to create a separate Scrum board for a single Epic. I am using the JQL query as follows:-

project = "xxx" AND (issuetype = Epic OR issuetype != Epic) AND ("Epic Link" = "yyy" OR "Epic Name" = "zzz") ORDER BY Rank ASC

The issue I am struggling with is to display Sub-Tasks in the Active Sprint and Backlog tabs.

Can someone help me with this?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Sub-tasks are not sprint items, they won't appear in the backlog or board as anything other than as a part of their parent issue (because that's all they are - a bit of a larger thing)

There's an annoying oversight in Jira when it comes to selecting sub-tasks.  In data terms, because a sub-task is part of its parent, they logically have the same Epic Link, Epic Name, Version, and Sprint (and a couple of others) as their parent does.  However, Jira does not cascade those down. 

So a search for "Epic link = yyy" will correctly select a set of issues, but it will exclude their sub-tasks because they don't have the field on them.

I'm afraid your search needs to be a lot more complicated, and you'll need apps to provide the JQL functions you need to be able to say "where parent's epic link is X, include that issue's sub-tasks"

[amol bansal]

Thanks for your answer @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- 

Then the only way I can see to have more clarity on the kind of tasks we are working on is to convert sub-tasks into tasks and then track.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes.  Thing is, if you're trying to build a board like this, it's quite likely that your sub-tasks are really stories, the layer below Epic, not parts of their parents.  So converting (most of) them upwards probably makes more sense.

I still think it's a weakness that Jira search and report doesn't tell us that sub-tasks are (automatically) part of an Epic because their parent is though.

[Daniel Turczanski - JQL Search Extensions]

Hi,
With standard JQL you can only get the direct children of epics. Subtasks are hard to fetch.

Standard JQL doesn't easily allow it but the results can be quickly found using our professional indexing service JQL Search Extensions.

You can simply search for:

issue in childrenOfIssuesInQueryRecursive("project='xxx' and 'Epic Name' = 'zzz'") or "Epic Name" = "zzz"

You can find out more in our docs.

I hope this helps!
Daniel