Substask

[NTAMEN NTANMI luc landry]

• what is the characteristic that subtasks have that all other types of requests do not have?

[Hamza Chundrigar · Accepted solution]

In its simplest form, a sub-task issue type behaves like a standard level issue type task with a few differences:

• Every sub-task absolutely has to have a parent. As you can appreciate, a sub-task is only a piece of a larger unit of work.
• Its parent task always resides in same exact project where the sub-task lives.

Moreover, a sprint cannot be completed if there are incomplete/open subtasks. This is by design and conforms to agile principles as subtasks are technically not standalone sprint items. They are parts of a whole issue, and that whole issue is that which actually belongs to a particular sprint that you have committed to completing in that sprint. In that scenario Jira will basically say “Hey, you can’t complete this sprint, even though Red Story 1 is marked as done, there are still open subtasks under Red Story 1 that haven’t been completed” and so you would have to reopen the story to correct the mistake and then close the sprint.

There’s also some reporting implications when it comes to subtasks. As far as I know, if you start using story points at the subtask level (which is not recommended as it goes against agile ways of working) then, as an example, the Velocity Chart does not consider sub-task estimates in it's calculation.

It’s not that I’m saying to avoid subtasks at all costs, rather knowing the upstream and downstream implications of using subtasks can help a person better determine when to use subtasks and how to approach them.

Best,

Hamza

[NTAMEN NTANMI luc landry]

thanks 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Sub-tasks are fragments of their parent, not fully independent issues, so they imply or derive some of their data from their parent rather than having it themselves (because it would be utter nonsense to have it different).

Versions, Security level, Epic link, Sprint estimate, and Sprint are the four most obvious ones that often confuse people who do not understand what a sub-task is.

Because a sub-task is part of something else, it's nonsense to release it as a different version than the parent is in.  Similarly, it's useless to hide or show only some sub-tasks if the parent is hidden.  Epic link is implied because the sub-task is part of an issue that is part of an Epic, as is Sprint.  Sprint Estimates don't exist on sub-tasks, because their estimate is included in the parent's estimate.

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Subtasks are a smaller pieces of work that needs to get done and usually we tend to break them down from tasks and they are less than a day's work. This help the developers chooses what to work on during their day.

[NTAMEN NTANMI luc landry]

I know that they can not contain others substasks

And they do not change rhe scup in burdown repport 

but isn't there anything else?