Unable to see Sub-Tasks anymore on my Jira Stories

[Sam Hammond]

As per Jira's new policy Epic → Story/Task → Sub-task is also not working for me since you roll-out this big change. It disrupted how we were managing the issues in our organization. We were previously creating sub-tasks under stories but now we are unable to do so. So i created an epic and tried to add a story under that but i am also not able to add story under and epic either now. Like i just want to add a sub-task under a story as story being the parent. But i am unable to do so now. Attaching my workflow hierarchy. Please tell me what to do and it's really urgent and important for me being a Scrum master and Project Lead my work is affected by this change.

You can see in the photos that i am unable to link my story to my epic or my sub-task to my story.

[Ryan M · Accepted solution]

Story should be a standard work type, the same level as task (level 0). You've moved it in the hierarchy to be level 3 in your hierarchy for some reason (this is nothing to do with atlassians changes), which is not where it should be. A work type thats higher in the hierarchy than another, cannot be its child (this is the point of hierarchy).

I assume by your question that this was not intentional, and if you want this to function as expected in a default setup, you would need to move Story back to the task level (level 0) in the hierarchy.

I'm not sure what other configuration items may have been tied to this change and might also need to be reviewed. If people have already been utilizing stories in this hierarchy, that will break/orphan any children of stories under level 3 in the hierarchy, so if it's been used much.... it might be a bit of a mess to clean up. I would recommend you would want to test your cleanup in recently updated sandbox first and have some UAT testers to make sure it doesn't affect anything important, because the effects of that change cannot be undone. 

[Sam Hammond]

@Ryan M The hierarchy was there by default. I am trying to create sub-tasks in my stories but without changing anything it just stopped showing me the create sub-tasks button on the stories. I just want to create sub-tasks under my story like I used to that is my main intent.

[Ryan M]

@sam AFAIK I don't believe it's possible that happened without intervention from a user, which may not have been you, but I digress.

Regardless of how it happened, your hierarchy is misconfigured compared to a default setup, and it's misconfigured for how you are describing how you want to use it. If you'd like to dive into how or why that was activated, I'd suggest contacting Atlassian Support.

Default, out of box hierarchy is Epic->Task->Sub-task. Any levels above default hierarchy are added by admins. Someone has activated the Feature level (level 2) above epics, then someone has also moved the story level from the default 0, to the top (level 3)

As mentioned before, Subtasks can only be added to level 0 work item types. Subtasks cannot pass a level. levels can only be parent/child of the level direct above/below them. Since subtasks MUST be level -1, they cannot attach to anything other than level 0 work items. 

With that in mind, if you'd like subtasks on stories, you need to remove Stories from the being a level 3 work item, and return them to the standard level 0.

As mentioned in my other message, this may have larger reaching impacts if story work item types are already being linked to other issues in a hierarchy, as the change would break existing hierarchies connected to story work items  You would need to review your own instances data to determine the impact/scope of that, and I recommend doing this and making the change in a sandbox first. It could be a non issue if no issues are linked to stories, but it could also require an exercise/project to fix the impacted work items. 

[Sam Hammond]

Thanks by removing the Stories from the level 3, I have been to fix this issue.