Connecting Subtasks to Ticket Status

[Nynke Polet]

Hi there, 

We use Jira for program planning. We use Tickets that automatically have certain subtasks that need to be completed throughout the program planning. 

The overall Ticket goes through 5 statuses. The subtasks go through a different flow. 
Does anyone know if it is possible to connect subtasks to the overall ticket status? 

Ideally we would like the setup to be the following: 
- An overall ticket cannot move to a new status before a subtask is completed. 
- Certain subtasks have to be completed in a specific ticket status

Attached an example of one of our tickets with subtasks. 

Would love to know if this would be possible and if so, if you know how to set it up! 

Best, 
Nynke

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

It's not "connecting" the status, more "stopping people getting it wrong", but you can achieve this.

You'll need to do a bit of mapping on exactly what you want to apply where, but it all gets done in the parent issue's workflow.

Imagine a very simple case, where the issue workflow is "to-do -> in progress -> done", and sub-tasks have a workflow of "red -> amber -> green"

Edit the workflow for the issue, and look at the transition that is "in progress -> done".  If you click on the transition, a box will pop up, with tabs for Conditions, Validators, Post-functions, Properties and Triggers. 

Go to Conditions, and add a new one - look for "Sub-Task Blocking Condition" in the list of possible conditions.  This will give you a list of status, from which you can choose one or many.

In my example, I select just "green" in there, then I save the workflow.

Now, I can not move my issues from in progress to done unless all of their sub-tasks are in green.  (Note - it will allow you to use the transition if there are no sub-tasks as well - there's nothing to check on if you have no sub-tasks!)

You can use conditions like that in any issue transition, but you'll need several different ones to get your rules set up.

[Nynke Polet]

You are amazing! I had been struggling with this for months and now it is done. 

One question from my side: we use different subtasks which need to be completed at different statuses in the overall issue workflow. 

Is it also possible to set a specific condition per sub-task? Or is it only possible to set one condition for all subtasks?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, you can have different conditions on different types of sub-task because you can set up different workflows by issue type.

If you've got a scripting tool added to your Jira, you could write more clever conditions that could look at other data.  The answer I gave before is using built-in functions.