Subtasks not working with stories

[Bjørn Olav Erland]

Hi,

we are trying to decompose stories into sub-tasks and we dont succeed getting it to work as it should.

When we set up a story we give a rough estimate of time for the whole story. Then we would like to decompose this into several subtasks. Problem is that all estimated time is added to the story so we double the time.

We then thought it could be a good idea to not keep any time in the story directly so when we decompose we would remove the story estimate and base it on subtasks instead. Problem is then that the intial estimate field for the story is emty and working with the backlog prioritizing tasks is difficult. As its now im inclined avoid using substasks alltogether..

Does anyone have a good solution for this?

[Jason Galea]

Hi @Bjørn Olav Erland,

You can perform this by installing the "Automation for JIRA Plugin" and set a numeric field called "Sub-Task Story Points" on Sub-Tasks.

As a Post-Function when creating a Sub-Task, use a math function that will add the "Sub-Task Story Points" with the existing Story Points of the Parent. 

Same goes for editing a sub-task, resolving, or removing.

Cheers,
Jason

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

This then neatly breaks your sprints, because the estimates are not counted.

[Bjørn Olav Erland]

We are not using story points, but time estimates. Would this also work with time estimates? 

[Bjørn Olav Erland]

It would have been perfect to have a flag in JIRA that turns on aggregation of estimates from subtasks and then would not use the time estimates in the story..

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It should do, although I've not tried to use automation to add up time estimates yet.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

A flag like that would not work for a lot of people, you'd need to allow for several different ways to do aggregates.   Atlassian ignore it completely, expecting you to estimate on the story level (also remember that the sub-tasks are utterly irrelevant when it comes to the calculations for burn-down etc)

[Bjørn Olav Erland]

So the solution is really not to assign time estimates to sub tasks..