How do I get sub task times to subtract from the parent task and not add to it?

[Sam Bartle]

I already know the answer that I will get from a quick search where everyone asking this gets the same answer (from the one person who seems to think this is rational calculation), however for everyone using this in a normal way.. how do you actually use time management properly in JIRA?

When I have a parent task and I decide it should take 4 hours, that is what i am allowing the people who work for me to do it. I therefore assign 4 hours to it.

I then  let the team decide who can do what fastest/best, divide that into sub tasks and assign times.. lets say they decide to split it into 4 sub-tasks, 1 hour each.

In the real world, the total time to do those 4 tasks is of course 4 hours, which would deduct 4 hours from the overall task (allotted 4 hours) and make the remaining time 0, With 4 hours logged.

However what JIRA does (and apparently is meant to do for some unfathomable reason), is to assign 8 hours to the task, being 4 for the task and 4 from all the sub-tasks. This cant possibly be the desired functionality for most users (certainly no one I've ever worked with past or present wanted it in some pretty big companies)

In the past we have worked round this bug by assigning 0 hours to the task and then setting the right times on the sub-tasks, but this doesn't work well for a distributed team. If we have to all meet to decide what times to put on everything to get to the allowed time we have, there's no point using JIRA.

I'm trying to get my current team to start using JIRA, and this is going to be a non-starter from initial discussions with them, is there some way to configure this functionality as desired?

[Irina Mosina (TechTime)]

Estimate as a team in Story Points to describe the complexity and the level of unknown about the task.

Once you kick off the work on the Task start tracking time (logging time) against sub-tasks.

Compare your original assessment of the effort estimate at the end of the cycle/iteration and adjust for the next task of similar nature.

You don't need to run scrum to benefit from this approach.  

[Jack Brickey]

The process I follow if I am using time tracking and sub-tasks is to only track on the sub-tasks. In your temp-down approach I would suggest the following: 

1. estimate the task (4h)
2. work with the team to scope the sub-tasks
3. remove the scope from task. If you want to retain for posterity sake consider a custom field, e.g. “rough estimate”